4 Ways to Measure Customer Engagement
by David Shapiro, Chief Sales Officer, Dialogue Marketing, Inc. -
May 26, 2015
4 Ways to Measure Customer Engagement
By David Shapiro, Chief Sales Officer, Dialogue Marketing, Inc.
In today’s marketplace, where customers want to interact with or buy from companies that are responsive and engaging, customer satisfaction is a shallow metric. Due in part to higher levels of competition present within all industries of business; it’s no longer enough to simply make sure a customer is satisfied. The key to creating and maintaining customer loyalty is customer engagement.
According to Eric Peterson of Web Analytics Demystified, “Customer engagement is an estimate of the degrees and depth of visitor interaction against a clearly defined set of goals.” In layman’s terms, customer engagement measures how involved or invested a customer is in a specific company, product, or service based on their actions, or lack thereof.
Doing Business in an Over-Connected World
Thanks to the Internet, a customer can share their positive AND negative experiences with a specific company to hundreds of friends on Facebook and Twitter as well as tens of thousands of complete strangers on Yelp or Amazon. Because the reach of social media far expands traditional word of mouth, positive customer testimony can serve as a form of free advertisement for a company’s goods or services, while negative testimony can drastically affect the company as a whole.
As a result, every customer interaction becomes extremely important. It is an opportunity to learn more about them, their habits and upcoming life events. It is also an opportunity to engage them, resolve any outstanding issues and offer additional products and services. Many contact centers are placing a greater emphasis on customer engagement…a great concept, but what does it mean? How does a company know it is actually engaging customers and not helping create another bad review?
Four Customer Engagement Measurements
1. First Call Resolution Rate
Evaluating the first call resolution rate (FCR) is one of the most important metrics used within a customer engagement center, as it measures the total percentage of calls requiring no follow-up or transfer. Many customer engagement centers fall short in their ability to effectively resolve customer inquiries during the first call, which greatly impacts not only operating costs, but also overall customer satisfaction.
Common factors that can impact a customer engagement center’s ability to maintain high FCR include:
Insufficient call representative empowerment;
Limited access to the IT systems;
Rigid policies inhibiting resolution;
Ineffective employee training; and
Poor call routing methods.
Ideally, for most consumer affairs and non-sales calls, FCR rates should be at or above 90 percent, meaning more than 90 percent of calls were handled without requiring any follow-up or transfer. The key to reaching this goal is making use of various tools that are designed to identify the nature of incoming calls in order to know in advance which representative should handle the call and what they need to be prepared to address.
2. Positive to Negative Call Sentiment
Many customer engagement centers choose to record the audio from phone calls in order to measure quality assurance within the contact center. For example, to evaluate complaints, companies can use voice-to-text analytics technology to categorize and trend positive and negative sentiment, identifying how many times words such as “lawsuit,” “anger” or “upset” were used.
In addition to the actual words, companies must also measure sentiment, or the tone and speed of a customer’s voice when monitoring recorded phone calls. For example, a caller whose voice becomes higher-pitched or changes pace throughout the call could indicate excitement or anger; therefore, both words and sentiment must be jointly considered to adequately measure engagement.
Companies utilizing voice biometrics can provide highly developed insight on the calls coming into a contact center by analyzing the content and categorizing the call based on what was said as well as how it was said and then scoring these phrases consistently. From this, the contact analyst can provide the business with common call measures and possible actions that can be taken to not only further improve call quality, but also improve overall customer engagement.
Using analytics, some systems can also identify word use and trending that was unplanned and unscripted. These programs can proactively identify when the topic of conversation changes during the call, allowing call center employees to zero in on topics to avoid or further emphasize based on the fluctuation of customer engagement levels afterwards. Systems utilizing these tools can also compare characteristics between different groups, such as the performance of the most effective agent versus the least effective agent, to more adequately measure success and provide potential improvements to be made surrounding customer engagement.
3. Social Media Monitoring
Over the past decade, the boom in social networking among consumers has led many companies to begin focusing on how best to make use of sites like Facebook, Twitter and online communities. There are millions of blogs and social networking sites, all generating literally billions of information and perspectives on companies all over the world. The online world is a far more dangerous environment for customer complaints, as opposed to calling the company directly or emailing/mailing a complaint. It is out there for the entire world to see, and it is a permanent record that can be detrimental to a company. While this can be used to gauge negative commentary, it can also gauge positive comments.
The key to successfully tracking comments in the social media space lies in segmenting the comments based on their overall sentiment. Generally, comments made about a company or on a company’s social media site can be broken into three customer segments: promoters, detractors and those looking for customer service help. After the comments are separated into each segment, the next step is to measure and trend them. Which segment has the most comments? Which has the most customers posting regularly? Also, tracking the frequency of posts in each segment is a key indicator of customer engagement. For instance, if the frequency of negative comments greatly exceeds the frequency of positive comments, there may be a need for adjustments to customer engagement methods.
4. Net Promoter Score
It’s been said that “satisfied” customers are not necessarily “loyal” customers. Customers are satisfied, because a company has offered them the standard level of service l they expected, no more, no less. Because of their non-stimulated state, these customers will shop anywhere and are less likely to serve as valuable brand ambassadors for a company.
“Loyal” customers, on the other hand, will tell everyone they know about their experiences and strongly encourage others to experience the same. Net Promoter Score (NPS), the scoring system that determines the likelihood that a customer will share their experience, good or bad, with a given product or service with their friends, family, co-workers, etc., aids companies in determining if they are providing standard services or those that may solidify a customer’s loyalty for years to come. Based on how high a customer’s NPS is, a company can determine whether or not immediate action needs to be taken in order to improve policies or methods related to customer complaints or inquiries.
SIDEBAR: “Calculating Net Promoter Score” chart
A deciding factor in changing a satisfied customer into a loyal customer lies in the actions of the company. Loyal customers continue to give specific companies their business, because the company exceeds their expectations, creating both a story to tell and setting a standard above other comparable companies. Because of this, a company is more likely to take immediate action for a customer that is consistently loyal to their products or services versus a customer who simply seems to like the company.
In addition, loyal customers are much more likely to share their excitement and satisfaction with their friends and family, which can not only increase sales for a company based on new business, but also save them money on advertising as word of mouth has been proven 50 times more powerful than general advertisement. In the end, customers want more than just help. They want value, empathy, reliability and, of course, exceptional service.
Ultimately, successful customer engagement efforts can result in a company experiencing an increase in overall customer lifetime value, or the amount of predicted revenue attributed to the continued relationship with a specific customer in the future. How can a company ensure it maintains a high level of lifetime customers? It all starts with knowing how to measure engagement.
Author
David Shapiro is Chief Sales Officer of Dialogue Marketing, Inc., a nationwide provider of customer relationship management (CRM) services that help companies of all sizes and across a wide range of industries acquire, support and retain customers.
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