How do you identify and measure successful client engagement?

kmcgrew

We are planning virtual sessions for our community members to learn best practices for use of our technology and network with their peers.  I’m curious how other organizations support networking for their community members.

I am also wondering how other success organizations measure if the client networking session was successful in the following areas:

• response rate
• level of engagement during the session
• increased use/adoption of our technology, evidence the client found value
• sales opportunities/securing renewal 
• improved CSAT
• improved client health

Any other areas you would measure?

Ed Powers

Such a great question, @kmcgrew. In past lives I facilitated CABs, focus groups and user groups, and measuring the business impact of these activities was exceedingly difficult. A big factor is self-selection bias, which muddies cause and effect. For example, did participation cause higher engagement, or because they were more engaged they participated?

One suggestion is to ask a sampling of interested participants about the outcomes they expect (and why) from such a session, and then measure afterwards if and how well those outcomes were satisfied. I would steer clear of anything NPS-oriented that speaks to future behaviors (referrals, renewals, etc.) because it's not fruitful. A recent meta-study showed that stated intentions predicted future behaviors only about 27% of the time.

Hope that helps! Good luck.

Anna Alley

I agree with what Ed stated above. I'd also be careful with trying to accomplish too many things or measure too many things from one event. I'd identify 1 or 2 very clear expected outcomes and then measure if that expected outcome actually occurred. Is the event something that you're doing to just facilitate networking within your customer base (if so, you may not really have a way to measure success besides a survey afterward). If an intention of the event is to increase customer engagement on your platform, then you should be able to track those that attended and if their usage increased in the 3 months following the event (and you should be clear on what usage means - just logins, specific actions, etc.). I think being thoughtful and intentional around the purpose of the event will naturally point you to how to measure it's success.

In terms of your question on how to support networking for your customer base, we had several different in-person events in high volume areas throughout the year, as well as our annual user conference. On an ongoing basis we encouraged cross-customer communication in our community platform through different engagements, question prompts, etc. and rewarded customers for not just answers to our questions but also answers to other customer questions.