What's the Difference Between Customer Engagement and Customer Satisfaction?

In the contact center, the concepts of “customer engagement” and “customer satisfaction” are often used interchangeably, but it’s important for call center management to remember that, while there’s overlap, they’re not the same thing. The differences between the two are primarily in where customers are in the customer lifecycle timeline. Customer engagement, if it happens, occurs earlier in the timeline. Customer satisfaction usually (but not always) is a result of customer engagement.

Because of these important differences, it’s important to create different tools to measure the two different concepts, according to a recent blog post by Maxime Urien writing for Onvey. There might also be a difference in the level of enthusiasm on the customer’s part.

“It might be wrong to measure user engagement at the early stages of customer onboarding, since a customer might be engaged in exploring your product but still not be satisfied with the features available or the produced service outcome,” wrote Urien. “For its part, an existing customer might be quite satisfied by the product or the service but not to be engaged in exploring the product and seeking new features or improvements.”

Below is some guidance in crafting different ways to measure engagement and satisfaction.

Customer engagement. Customer engagement is a metric used to determine how customers are responding to your products, services and marketing efforts. It can precede a purchase. It’s generally measured through the use of website metrics or analysis of responses to a campaign.

“You can both observe the user behaviors or try to engage your clients in taking specific actions in order to assess their level of engagement,” wrote Urien. “For instance, if you introduce additional services around your core services, which is common for most SaaS (News - Alert) services, then you can measure how many clicks requesting more info these additional services are getting from users of your main service.”

Customer satisfaction. This metric should be used after customers have purchased (and gotten a chance to use) your products or services. Unlike customer engagement, measuring customer satisfaction requires direct feedback from your customers. What you’re measuring is how customer expectations were satisfied (or not satisfied) with the actual experience.

“For instance, you might be developing a Kanban-style project management tool in the cloud and might have incorporated features you think are useful e.g. right-click functions,” wrote Urien. “However, your customer might expect drag-and-drop functionality, not right-button mouse clicks; therefore, you should measure not only the overall customer satisfaction but also their experience compared to their expectations.”

Customer satisfaction should be measured through direct outreach to customers through surveys (either live or via IVR), email, online polls, social media posts or formalized focus groups.

To understand your customers as well as possible, measure the two metrics independent of one another; customer engagement is at the earlier stages of customer onboarding and when introducing new features and services. Begin measuring customer satisfaction at any stage of the sales funnel and throughout the entire process of service development and maintenance. Together, these two KPIs can offer call center management unprecedented levels of visibility into the customer experience. 

Edited by Alicia Young