For modern businesses operating online, it has become clear that customer engagement metrics are quite useful and fundamental for future prospects. Companies are continuously investing in ways of gaining customer engagement metrics. This is mainly because these metrics can be used in making strategic decisions such as value addition to a product. In simple terms, the following are information that help the business determine:
- Whether the customer understands the value they provide
- Which value the customer frequently seeks
- Whether the business understands the value customers seek
Therefore, measuring customer engagements brings quite a number of vital information and metrics.
Customer Engagement Metrics To Measure
When selecting the customer engagement metrics to measure, there are a few guidelines that should be used. This is because user interactions give rise to several metrics and some may not be helpful.
Therefore, it is important to measure specific metrics that are in line with achieving the organization’s goals. The basic principles used in choosing specific metrics that will be measured are business focus and purpose. The business’ purpose, mission, goals and objectives should shape the metric to be measured and not the other way around.
The metrics listed below are those that influence your operations and business in general. They affect major decisions that are used in designing user engagement strategies. The top three metrics thus include the following;
Active Time
This is one of the most important customer engagement metrics any business should measure. It is the time customers or users actively interact with your product or service. This should not be confused with log-in time. Log-in time basically refers to the time a user is online logged into your website.
Modern users are fond of working with several browsers, tabs and windows which mean they can be logged in but busy with other activities. Active time is the actual time they scroll and click on your pages exclusive of idle times. When compared to the physical business world, active time would represent customers who are engaging you into a conversation on your product like in bargaining. It filters people standing close to your shop taking a phone call or doing other things not directly involving your offer even though they are well aware of it.
The active time metric is very important since it tells the business that customers are either searching for value or interacting with the offer. Once it is known how long customers interacted with the service, their final decisions can be used to describe an experience which is basically engagement.
If the customer subscribed to a service or mailing list, downloaded something, watched a clip, listened to music, ordered an item or did any other cause of action, then they found value. This may not necessarily mean satisfaction.
It indicates some form of value was found. If they interacted and left without doing anything, it could mean they were unable to find value or could not access it which may suggest issues with usability. Nonetheless, the implications are dynamic and vary depending on the nature of business.
Visitor Recency
Visitor recency in customer engagement metrics is a very important bit of information. Once you know how long a customer spends actively interacting with your service, it becomes necessary to find out how frequent they come back. This will help you determine how much often they use your services. With this information, you can gain insight on how they grow fond of the service and what types of customers they are.
In Google Analytics, visitor recency enables you to view a percentage of your visitors who come back and how many times in a day, every other day, in a week, a month, sporadically and so forth. When customers visit your site more frequently in a week or a day, it could mean the product or service is slowly growing into them and becoming part of their life. However, it should be noted that recency can be as a result of positive or negative adjustments to a service and/or product.
Visits are affected by other factors, including SEO and seasonal swings of traffic. Knowing how often visitors come back to find the value will also expose other metrics like which values are sought and used more and other patters during their time of interaction with the service. The information can be used to develop complementary and supplementary offers. It can also help web designers to improve the user interface and reduce usability blocks that keep customers from obtaining the offered value.
Core Value or Action
This is the third and very important user engagement metric that is often used in analyzing abovementioned metrics. Once you know how much time a customer interacts with your service and how often, core value becomes the final step of analyzing this set of metrics. Core action refers to the value provided which is reflected by the user taking a last action as intended by the business.
It can be subscription, download of materials, sign up to a forum or community, or purchase and ordering of a product whether digital or tangible. If customers are consistently performing core actions like downloading or purchasing products, then it means they are adopting your service. It tells the business that their customer understands offered value and is happy to frequently use it.
However, if customers are not performing core actions despite spending active time, it could present various problems. The first scenario would be that customers are unable to find the offered value which may suggest usability, interfacing and navigation problems. It could also be as a result of the business not understanding which value its customer finds when interacting with the service. The core actions are service specific and vary from company to company.
Conclusion
Information regarding customer or user engagement is very important for every business. The modern emphasis is on long term interactions and improvement of experience to achieve loyalty which is only possible by carefully analyzing user engagements. However, not all metrics will be worth measuring and there are several of them. Since business time and resources are supposed to be spent on worthy causes, it is important to first understand the goals and purpose of measuring any given metric. The above customer engagement metrics are however very vital for any type of business.
