Customer Engagement vs. Customer Experience
Written by Support EXP
Engaged customers matter! Focusing on customer engagement is an excellent option if you’ve been searching for the best way to decrease turnover and increase loyal and committed buyers.
Yet it can be confusing to separate customer engagement from customer experience and see how the two concepts can work together to create the best possible reputation for your brand.
In this article, we’re pulling the curtain back as we examine customer engagement vs. customer experience—the differences between the two, the benefits of engagement, and how you can leverage it for better CX.
Key Takeaways:
- Customer experience refers to every aspect of a customer’s interaction with your brand, while customer engagement involves driving interactions with your business.
- Customer engagement is central to customer experience management because it reveals the consumer’s perspective of your brand.
- Customer engagement can be a better predictor of sales and ROI than other commonly used metrics like customer satisfaction.
What Is the Difference Between Customer Engagement and Customer Experience?
While customer engagement and customer experience are often used in the same contexts, they’re not the same idea. Here are some of the distinctions of customer engagement vs. customer experience:
Combine CX and AI and you get a powerful tool for analyzing customer experience data. Smart AI technology can include chatbots for faster customer service, adaptive analytics that predict customer trends before they happen, and a multi-faceted approach to the customer experience.
Customer Experience (CX)
Customer experience is a broad term that covers every aspect of a customer’s interaction with your brand—from how easy it was to access your website to how likely they are to recommend you to a friend.
Customer Engagement
On the other hand, customer engagement is a subset often used to help improve or gauge the customer’s overall experience with the brand. Engagement is about promoting a potential client’s interaction with your company.
These interactions can be as fundamental as following or liking you on social media or buying from your company multiple times. Overall, customer engagement seeks to measure and improve a person’s perception of your business from their interactions with you.
Boosting customer engagement can be essential for a better customer experience, but are the two concepts measured the same way?
Charting customer engagement is one way to get a feel for the broader state of your customer experience. Usually, measuring customer experience covers other aspects, like product satisfaction, ease of use, and the likelihood of a buyer promoting you to others.
There are plenty of advantages to measuring customer engagement, however. Prioritizing a relationship with customers gives you a greater likelihood of repeat buyers, a higher customer lifetime value, and increased willingness of your clients to recommend you to others.
How Do CX and Customer Engagement Work Together?
Regarding the retail and digital customer experience, customer engagement is a valuable tool for CX.
The overall goal of a good customer experience strategy should be to see your brand from the eyes of the consumer. Customer engagement helps you to do this by showing how buyers interact with your brand, including whether their interactions are positive or negative—do one-time buyers tend to stick around or leave after a single purchase?
Is your social engagement high or low? How often do website visitors stay?
Answering customer engagement questions will help you develop a more well-rounded, robust picture of how customers see your business.
Thus, customer engagement can be critical to your customer experience management. However, don’t let it be the last word—remember to use these metrics as part of a more comprehensive overall strategy with other metrics, not as the only part of your CX plan.
Remember that engagement is a valuable subset of CX, not the last word!
The Relationship Between Engagement and Customer Satisfaction
How does engagement relate to satisfaction when it comes to customer engagement vs. customer experience?
Ultimately, customer engagement is a better metric for determining actual turnover and ROI than satisfaction.
Early in sales and marketing history, customer satisfaction was the “gold standard” for determining the customer experience—higher satisfaction was thought to produce more sales, loyal customers, and less turnover.
It seems intuitive—if a customer is delighted with a product, won’t they be more likely to buy more and recommend it to others? However, researchers began questioning this conclusion in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
A banking analysis found that among “extremely satisfied” customers, 6% closed their account—slightly worse than the 5.8% of less satisfied customers who did the same.
Why is customer satisfaction an unreliable metric? Put simply: it doesn’t dig deeper to measure how a customer feels about your brand.
If a buyer appreciates your price but feels no emotional connection to your company, they’ll jump ship as soon as a cheaper item hits the market—even if they were “highly satisfied” with their purchase.
What’s a better way to measure retention? Enter customer engagement metrics.
Customer engagement is better because it includes emotion and loyalty in its analysis. It examines brand interactions to see if customers are just buying and leaving, or if they’re sticking around, leaving a good review, or following you on social media.
Switch your goals to increasing customer engagement, improving customer service, and broadening opportunities for clients to engage on a personal level. You’ll create customers who aren’t just happy buyers—they’re emotionally tied to your brand.
This approach keeps clients around longer. While 6% of highly satisfied customers closed their bank accounts, only 3.8% of highly engaged clients did the same.
In conclusion, don’t view customer engagement vs. customer experience as an either/or scenario. Rather, customer engagement is a valuable metric that can help you get a better, fuller picture of how likely customers are to stay engaged, committed, and loyal to your brand.
When measuring customer engagement, it’s essential to use it as part of an overall CX strategy rather than the final word. However, when appropriately used, customer engagement can better predict actual sales and ROI than other common KPIs and metrics like customer satisfaction.
Are you a bank or credit union looking for help to boost your customer engagement?
At Support EXP, we offer advanced data-gathering solutions and analytics designed to help you create the best customer experience possible for your clients.
Contact us below to discuss your options and get a quote!