It’s about appropriately measuring Customer & User Engagement…
With the growth of SaaS industry, more and more Product Management teams are wondering as to how they can measure a very important aspect, and potentially the strongest leading indicator of success for SaaS Platforms: User Engagement.
User Engagement refers to a set of metrics that can track how many users are actually interacting with your Mobile App or SaaS Platform and to what extent. As a Stakeholder, Product Manager or a CEO of a tech company revolving around a product, it is imperative to keep an eye on actual usage of the product, at a customer as well as an end-user level. Both lead to insights that can help course correct (while you still have time), or create additional options of growth to thrive in an ever-increasing competitive business environment.
The goal of a SaaS or Mobile App CEO should be to increase the LTV (Lifetime Value) from each customer. It is obvious that measuring customer engagement & user engagement is a key tool that will help them achieve that goal. By getting a true measure of engagement, actionable decisions can be made about:
- How to identify customers/users who are about to churn?
- How to identify customers/users appropriate for a cross sell or upsell?
- How to identify features being heavily used, and ones that are not getting traction (and why)?
- Which factors are potentially causing improvement or deterioration on engagement?
A glimpse into the history
The need for measuring engagement is not new. For the last decade, several studies and reports have been available in the market. Few of them that are worth noticing are:
- A user engagement study by Lehmann et al, 2012 noticed users frequented tech products with different frequencies and suggested the following user categories based on the number of days per month they used the product.
2. Similarly, a study focused on branded mobile phones by Kim, Lin & Sung, 2013 noticed that most of the tech products incorporated at least one of the seven Engagement Attributes: Control; Customization; Vividness; Multi platforming; Motivation; Feedback; Novelty.
3. Another study by O’ Brien, 2015 concluded that there were 3 Primary information sources for measuring user engagement, with different characteristics:
- Self Reported: They pertain to questionnaires, surveys, interviews, app reaction cards, thinking aloud.
- Cognitive Engagement: They pertain to the factors like time spent, follow on tasks, neurological measures (EEG) or physiological measures (eye-tracking, heart rate, etc.)
- Interactive Engagement: They are related to app data analytics, regression & data science.
4. Finally, a study by [Peterson et al, 2016] reported that Tech App Engagement is best measured as a consolidation of 8 Indices: Duration index, Loyalty index, Retention index, Feedback index, Performance index, Recall index, Social index, and Interaction index.
Do solutions for measuring engagement exist?
While the value of being able to measure engagement has increasingly been felt by most Product Owners, Managers and IT Professionals, it has been tough getting hold of a Solution that really delivers. In July 2018, Gartner published the following report that lists some solutions that can help you measure engagement. You can download the guide through this link: Market Guide for Web and Mobile App Analytics.
What is missing in the solution above?
While the solutions above help in getting some idea about the engagement levels, after trying them out, we figured that there were a few gaps. Each of these solutions was providing a bunch of measures or metrics, without helping put them together into a consolidated and meaningful engagement score.
Also, engagement is a moving target. What engages customers and users today fails to keep them interested in a couple of quarters down the line. Hence, the algorithm to measure this needed to be flexible enough to add or modify parameters as and when required.
We were looking for a solution that could give us a consolidated engagement score, and then provide insights so that we can drill down on each of those parameters for further analysis. We also wanted to see if we could build a solution that could help influence people engagement positively, and then be able to track if the actions taken actually led to an enhancement of engagement.
We were also looking for a solution that could help us understand how we were doing on engagement, relative to other Apps or SaaS Solutions, and not always as an absolute. And finally, we were hoping that with ML and AI being built into the solution, over time regression would help polish the algorithm and fine-tune the output for even better results.
What we ended up creating:
Based on our research on the history of engagement processes, and the gaps we found in them, we designed our own solution to measure all the aspects of a user engagement process that a subscription based business needs. This is designed around 4 indices based on which a holistic insight can be obtained. They are:
- Duration Index
- Retention Index
- Performance Index
- Loyalty Index
The post SaaS: The Rules of Engagement appeared first on SmartKarrot l Comprehensive Customer Success.
