Regardless of niche, the customer engagement analytics process is always the same. People are coming to your website and engaging with something on your platform. You can use that information to learn what they do on your website, how they interact with your product, and whether they find it useful.
Customer engagement analytics is an excellent way of understanding if customers have any trouble using your product or whether it solves their problems or not.
Creating a customer survey and getting feedback on what they do on your website and how they like it is another excellent way of acquiring customer feedback.
In the next few paragraphs, I’ll talk about:
- How to approach the customer engagement analytics process?
- What are the most important metrics?
- How can I help you do the customer engagement analytics the right way?
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How to approach the customer engagement analytics process?
The customer engagement analytics structure typically starts with identifying a particular customer’s journey. For example, their journey could have started from finding your website, going through some content, interacting with chat, sending an email, analyzing your product, and finally buying. All these touchpoints are essential in one’s customer journey.
In customer engagement analytics, you must figure out how to collect information from these touchpoints.
So, the simplest version of that would be to track how many people interact with these touchpoints (how many of them talked with your customer support, how many clicked the link on the blog post, etc.). That’s usually the starting point.
The second question you have to ask yourself is – what is the valuable information about these customer touchpoints that’s essential to collect. The goal is to understand, from a business perspective, what information is more valuable than the other and, from a technical perspective, the best possible ways of collecting it.
Quantitative VS qualitative data
Data could be quantitative or qualitative.
Quantitative data can help you gather insights on overall user actions and usage trends and lets you examine answers behind your numerical data. In other words, it can answer only your number-based inquiries.
Qualitative data can’t be expressed as a number. So instead, you usually describe it with words, pictures, and symbols.
You can gather both types of data from analytics platforms, product analytics, customer support, or getting more feedback from customers about their experiences with your product. You want to understand how these different customer engagement touchpoints impact your overall results.
The most relevant metrics are customer lifetime value, customer retention, customer satisfaction, or how much time they spend on your website. Also, you need to figure out what metric improves the most when engagement improves. We’ll talk more about these metrics in the next section.
Once you collect this data, you need to figure out how to go deeper and understand which groups of customers are more engaged with your product. Typically, you would do customer engagement to improve customer experience in the first place and, as a result, to improve some of these metrics, such as CLV or customer satisfaction.
The importance of customer surveys
One thing I need to mention is when you do qualitative analytics; it’s essential to get direct feedback from customer surveys. In many cases, customer surveys are the most precise ways to get the most accurate answers and create improvement strategies based on that.
Many people only care about Google Analytics and other analytics platforms, while the most accurate answers lie in customer surveys.
Finding the balance between qualitative and quantitative analytics is usually the best option.
Second, when you have a small base of customers, or you’re just getting started (less than 1000 users), it’s much more helpful to do qualitative analytics and talk to your users/customers. Mixpanel is also an option to consider, especially for SaaS companies.
Even though we, as a company, focus primarily on quantitative data, in cases of early-stage startups and small businesses, qualitative data is much more valuable. So it’s important not to jump to Google Analytics too early.
What are the most important customer engagement metrics?
Among many relevant customer engagement metrics, there are a few that I would like to highlight. You should be paying close attention to the following metrics:
1. Customer lifetime value
Customer lifetime value is the total worth to a business from a customer over the whole relationship period. It’s an important metric as it costs less to keep existing customers than to acquire new ones.
2. Retention score
For how long someone decides to stay as your customer, whether we talk about ecommerce subscriptions or SaaS customers on higher pricing plans. You can say that we measure here which customers are the most loyal.
3. Customer satisfaction
Qualitative data where people express their opinions and experiences – what they are happy with and what could be improved. Or, for example, what parts of your product or website are easy for them to handle, and on the other hand, where do they get stuck. Customers identify the problem instead of you, so you can fix it much easier.
4. Net promoter score
This metric helps you measure your customers’ trust in your products/services and their willingness to recommend them to others. In addition, it enables you to check customer loyalty according to the products or services.
5. Average session duration
You usually want customers to spend more time on your app or website. However, that’s not always the case. For example, if you know they wanted to do something quickly and spent an hour instead, it means they got stuck, and you have to make things easier for them.
How can I help you do the customer engagement analytics the right way?
The main goal for me is to organize the customer engagement data.
First, I identify the most critical metrics for different types of customers and then narrow it down and find the right audiences for you. Then, I recommend changes that can improve your customer engagement metrics.
The focus is (almost) always on high-level business objectives. The primary question is – what improvement opportunities exist? Then, I do the analysis and, based on that, recommend suggestions and changes in customer engagement.
Also, one of the main goals is to do the testing and optimization to improve your metrics.
Finally, the goal of customer engagement analytics is to have a voice of the customer heard and have the correct information to make the right decisions and changes.
I’ve done it so many times for many different customers (as well as other data analytics tasks), so there’s no way I could experience a new problem or situation.
Final verdict
So, what are the key takeaways?
- Track all customer touchpoints and collect the information from them.
- In most cases, both qualitative and quantitative data are important.
- There are cases when customer surveys could be more helpful than data from analytics platforms.
- Pay close attention to the essential metrics we mentioned above.
- If this process takes too much of your precious time (which is likely the case), don’t hesitate to contact us.