Customer Engagement Score: What Is It & How to Calculate It

We’ve discussed customer service in detail in previous maakeAcademy blogs, but now it’s time for you to find out how to calculate your Customer Engagement Score (CES). This score tells you whether your customers are actively using the products and services your business offers. With this knowledge, you will have a clear idea about which customers are likely to stick around for the long haul, and what issues they are having.

Here we explain everything about a customer engagement score, including the information you need to achieve a legitimate score, and how to make your customers happier once you know what their problems are. Once you have a detailed understanding of how your customers interact with your website, you will have a good idea of how to handle them better.

What is a Customer Engagement Score?

A customer engagement score (CES) offers a number that tells you how active a customer is with your product or service. This score is based on their actions, not their opinions. When a customer acts in a meaningful way, their score increases, and when the score shows they aren’t engaging, it drops.

You see, a customer’s actions show their behavior over time. A survey would reveal how your customer feels in that moment, but their actions tell you what they are likely to do over time.

The CES Is Used To

● Make Better Decisions: By using the score, you can make strategic decisions about customer engagement, instead of assuming you know the answers.
● Target Expansion: On the upside, if the customer has a high score, this could mean they are ready to upgrade to a higher tier or be happy with add-ons to your offerings.
● Onboard Better: Sometimes customers skip key steps in their onboarding, and don’t fill in details correctly. This score helps you find any issues they are having and solve them.
● Build Loyalty & Prevent Churn: If you calculate the score over a period and it starts to decline, you can contact the customer and sort out the problem before they leave.

Don’t Confuse a CES with the Following

Many people confuse the Customer Engagement Score (CES) with either a CSAT (Customer Engagement Score) or a Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Let’s explain the difference:
• CSAT: This score measures how happy a customer is with a particular product or service of yours, or an interaction you have with them.
• NPS: The score measures a customer’s loyalty, satisfaction and enthusiasm towards a particular business, service or product.
• CES: The CES measures a customer’s behaviour regarding a product or service. It measures a customer’s progress when they ask your business for assistance with a problem, or what they need to do when they use or purchase one of your products or services.

How to Calculate CES

Let’s be honest: every person has their own relationship with your business, so there isn’t one perfect formula to register a particular score. This all depends on the customer and your business, and their relationship with your brand, your products and services. So, consider your own business and ask yourself what a “meaningful engagement” with your brand, products or services would be.

Here’s how to work out your individual CES. Try one of the following:

1. Weighted Actions

Select a few actions that a customer does. These actions include logging onto your site and using key features, as well as how your customer service teams responds to the customer’s queries. Now, give each action a particular weight, the number of points you assign to each action, based on its importance. Give a higher weight number to an action that shows real value, and a lower weight if it’s not that crucial.

Your formula would be:
Engagement Score = (Weight x Action) + (Weight x Actiion) + (Weight x Action)

2. Negative Signals

It’s a good idea to add negative signals to keep the score as fair as possible.
These could include the following:
• Period of no activity at all.
• The customer skips onboarding steps.
• Customer requests assistance or asks a question then disappears or asks the same question a second time.
• Support team doesn’t respond timeously to customer queries.

Your calculations would include, for example:
Engagement Score over 30 days = (5 x logins) + (3 x days inactive) + (7 x support queries)

This keeps the score as realistic as possible. It shows growth actions as well as risk when activity slows or problems happen again.

3. Choose a Time Period

It’s best to select a period that reflects how your customer uses your website/product/service. This could be every day, weekly, or monthly, as in the calculation above.

4. Normalise Your Score

This makes it simpler to compare scores, so convert your score to a percentage, between 0 & 100, no higher.

Normalised score = (Raw score ÷ Target max score) × 100

Your Target max score is the score you would give a customer that is actively engaged within your given period.

Here's an example, using a monthly (30-day) period:

Calculation: 25 + 40 + 16 − 21 − 16 = 44

It’s time to normalise your score. Here’s how: If your Target max score for 30 days is 60. So, the normalised score would be:

Normalised score = (44 ÷ 60) × 100 = 73,33; rounded up to 73.

This score shows the customer is active but requires guidance to read a range of high engagement (over 80 points).

What to Track

Remember, with a CES, the most important items are the actions a customer makes. So, track meaningful actions that show there’s progress, not ones that show the customer is busy. You don’t want to track activity here; what’s important is engagement. To do this, select a few actions that show the customer is engaged. Don’t add too many, as this could skew the results.

Action Checklist

A good action list usually includes the following:
1. Actions regarding a product or products. These show usage.
2. Actions requesting support or assistance. These show how the customer interacts when requesting help.
3. Negative signals. This keeps scores honest when things aren’t working or when customers go silent.

Track the Following Customer Actions

• Completed setup: This first step will show success. Data available from the onboarding checklist.
• Used key features: A step that shows customer is receiving value. Data available from product analytics.
• Days active: This step shows engagement over a period. Data gleaned from product analytics.
• Days inactive: Negative. Silence could mean customer wants to leave. Data received from login records, product analytics.
• Invited a friend: Very positive. Customer is so happy that he recommended the product/service to someone else. Data available through new customer details.
• Number of logins: Can sometimes be useful. Logins, product analytics data.
• Viewed help FAQs/articles: Could mean education but could also mean confusion. Data available through analytics from your help centre.
• Starts live chat: Could be useful, depending on chat context. Data from live chat history.
• Email response to Support: Shows the customer is trying to solve a problem. Data from Support emails.
• Support ticket reopened: Negative engagement shows customer dissatisfied or issue not yet resolved. Data from Support history.
• Unresolved problem: The longer this issue remains unresolved, the more negative the outcome. Data from Support history.

Choose Actions that Suit Your Business

eCommerce

For this type of business, focus on customers with repeat purchases and the problems they have that lead to requesting support. Track repeat orders, how often the customer logs in, checks order status, and needs help. Include negative signals regarding unresolved queries or just one purchase.

Service Business

Focus on customer follow-ups, renewals, referrals and their responsiveness. Check how many times the customer calls or emails you, how often they attend meetings, whether they renew timeously, and whether they refer you to other people. Negative signals include missing follow-ups and long delays in responding.

SaaS

Your focus should be on how active customers are, and which features they adopt. Track whether they complete the setup, which features they use, when they’re inactive and if they respond to invitations. A negative signal would be requesting the same assistance for a problem for a second time.

How to Use Your CES

Each customer should fit into a score segment that shows whether they are highly engaged (80+), moderately engaged (50 to 79) or insufficiently engaged (below 50). Once you have these scores, you will know whether a customer requires urgent assistance or just a gentle push, and who’s so engaged that they are ready to upgrade or purchase more.

Once you have ranges, add meaning to them. This makes your score useful across support, success, and sales.

Let’s discuss each of these segments in detail:

• Highly Engaged: The customer is receiving value from your product/s or service/s. Now you can offer an upgrade or another product, ask them for a review to check just how happy they are, or invite them to share some feedback. Grow the relationship, but don’t be too pushy; they already like your brand.
• Moderately Engaged: The customer is quite happy with your product/s or service/s, but they still need attention. Show them you care with regular check-ins and offer support when they need it. As these customers are showing interest, find out what’s missing in the relationship so you can give them better value.
• Insufficiently Engaged: This could be because the customer is stuck or confused about something. Perhaps they’re losing interest in your product/s or service/s. Be quick and be proactive; reach out with assistance. Show interest, reduce their effort and remove issues fast.