Key Customer Engagement Metrics to Track in 2022

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to read your customers’ minds? While mind reading may not be doable, there is a way to know exactly what your customers think of your service or product. Not to mention, it’s a bit more accurate than mind reading.

We’re talking about customer engagement, which is how brands build lasting relationships with customers across multiple communication channels. Engaging customers in ongoing dialogue is one of the best ways to get to know your customers and learn about where you can improve.

Below, we dive into why customer engagement is important for understanding today’s customer and offer examples of metrics you can use to track the effectiveness of your customer engagement strategy.

H2: Why Is Customer Engagement Important?

Customer engagement is one of the best ways to take the guesswork out of what your customers are thinking. While many customers like to approach the online purchase process on their own or by referencing self-service information, many would like the opportunity to chat with someone from your organization to answer their questions and steer them in the right direction.

By adding in multiple touchpoints and communication channels between your team and your customers, you can help nurture customer relationships and create a more fulfilling customer service experience.

Listening to your customers and gauging areas for improvement can also help you develop loyal customers who can become brand evangelists, bringing other customers your way via word of mouth.

H2: Key Metrics to Track the Success of Your Customer Engagement Strategy

While your business goals may vary, these KPIs will help you measure the success of your customer engagement efforts through customer-driven data.

H3: Leading indicators

Leading indicators fall into the category of “soft KPIs,” meaning they focus on qualitative measurements rather than the objective, measurable data nature of hard KPIs. These are helpful in pinpointing areas of improvement to focus on.

Leading indicators include:

• Email open and response rates
• Text read and reply rates
• Social media engagement
• Repeat visits to your website or monthly active users (MAU)
• Time spent on your website and on specific pages
• Conversion rates
• Call talk time with customer service

H3: Lagging indicators

Lagging indicators take a retroactive look at what’s already happened within your organization and can be used to show progress over time.

These metrics include:

• Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Customer effort score (CES)
• Customer churn and retention rates
• Customer lifetime value (CLV)

Customer engagement is a key metric to nurture and develop in today’s competitive market. For even more inspiration on how to create a lasting customer engagement strategy, this infographic from Sinch outlines examples of brands that are knocking customer engagement out of the park and shares lessons learned from successful brands.