#TrueblueTips | What is Customer Engagement Score and how to measure it

When talking about Customer Engagement, we refer to the companies’ will to establish relationships with their audience, aiming at nurturing and guiding users’ choices.

The Trueblue’s CES was born for this purpose, and it amounts to a combined metric allowing the monitoring of both the interaction and the engagement of the client, therefore giving a complete vision on multiple channels. The metric combines different elements: number of channels through which the interaction occurs, the channel’s context, frequency, enrichment and the engagement’s impact.

User is the King

From this viewpoint, far from the one of 30 years ago, the user is no longer a passive protagonist of Top Down and unidirectional campaigns or messages, but becomes an active protagonist able to guide and be guided by bidirectional communications in which the company is the interlocutor in an increasingly dynamic and participative dialogue.

The fundamental element in this dialogue is represented by the increasingly digitalized marketing activities, which need, now more than ever, a metric to monitor the customer interaction from a multichannel perspective. In every industry, including Pharma & Life Science, the need for direct contact with the end user (the potential user of a product or service) no longer happens in a single channel though a single message, but we have multiple levels, at multiple times and with different messages adapted to each context.

The traditional TV commercial on the importance of Vitamin C supplements in January - March is followed by the same type of content, but with different messages and products, focusing more on the need to avoid the symptoms of fatigue as summer heat approaches. This is just one of the many ways in which a need can be triggered depending on how a message or product is conveyed, always adapting to the need of the end user. The TV communication will be complemented by activities in industry media, the Social Media Plan, and the actions of scientific informants at the point of sale.

The Angelini Pharma #maseifuori case

Let’s talk about the case of Angelini Pharma, leading company in the Pharma industry, which has just concluded a 960-million-dollar agreement on the acquisition of Arvelle Therapeutics.

Those who follow its marketing activities can see, especially recently, an increasing use of the social media channel. For example, the #maseifuori campaign has seen, among others, the involvement of Influencer Andrea De Logu (@AndreaLa Rossa) and other Brand Ambassadors. Their common goal did not stop at communicating information about the company’s product aimed at helping patients with Schizophrenia, but it expanded to spread a social commitment of sharing valuable and educational content on a sensitive topic such as Schizophrenia.

This example is proof of the importance of multichannel, which grows for every industry and goes beyond a phantomatic traditional approach that might lead us to think “certain actions can be valid in one industry but not the other”. A concept that is partially true but false at the same time because what leads marketing and, in general, Customer Engagement processes is and will always be data, numbers.

So, how is (CES) Customer Engagement Score measured?

We introduced the topic by saying that CES is a metric for monitoring customer interaction from a multichannel perspective. The starting point of the measurement is to map all components of the multichannel process and their enablers (tools, sub-processes, segmentations, customer journey). Each channel is given a certain role and importance within what will be defined as the Brand's Multichannel Vision. Everything is done to define and validate the relevant "Success KPIs" for each channel involved.

Let’s see a concrete example, namely the one of a pharmaceutical company which identifies the following as the preferred channels of a multichannel strategy: DEM & Marketing Automation, Point of Sales actions and Field Force actions. Each channel will be associated with different grades of importance through a Customer Engagement Engine which will measure “Weighted interactions”. Specifically, DEM & Marketing Automation will have a higher Weighted Interaction when a link inside the email is clicked, and a lower score when the email is simply opened.

The different Weighted Interactions will then be combined using Artificial Intelligence technologies to create an easily readable total indicator that is useful for making strategic decisions both about the effectiveness of each channel and the allocation of future investments, thereby optimizing the ROI and overall performance of each activity.

“Torture numbers, and they’ll confess to anything”

As a conclusion to this brief consideration, we decided to use the quote of American writer Gregg Easterbrook because we believe it perfectly summarizes the value of numbers and data.

The Customer Engagement Score, is a summary of a symbolic “torture” on volumes of big data which aren’t always analyzed or simply ignored because of their complexity. However, monitoring the clients’ interaction in a multichannel perspective is not data we can ignore or underestimate. Today more than ever, returning that information though timely and easy-to-use interpretation is crucial to transform data in Customer-focused strategic actions.