Top 6 User Engagement Metrics to Track

Engaging your customers is the key to lowering churn and leaving no client behind. Knowing the user engagement metrics that matter for your business can help improve your performance. Here are six top KPI categories to track:

1. License utilization
2. Product adoption rate
3. Stakeholder engagement
4. Customer health score
5. Customer sentiment indicator
6. Support metrics

We’ll cover what each of these metrics measure, why they’re important and how to track them.

1. License Utilization

License utilization is one of the most fundamental user engagement metrics. It measures how many licensed users on an account are actively using a software app compared to the total numbers of licenses on the account. This is important as an indicator of whether an account is positioned for growth or churn. An account near full license utilization may be ripe for expansion, whereas one with low utilization may be at risk of churn.

To track license utilization, simply divide an account’s number of active users by its total number of licenses and multiply by 100 to convert to a percentage. Within Totango’s platform, this can be calculated as a ratio between Active Users and Licenses for a given account.

2. Product Adoption Rate

Product adoption rate is similar in concept to license utilization rate, but rather than simply telling you whether customers are using their licenses, it tells you how actively customers are taking actions such as logging into their accounts or using specific product features. This directly correlates with how engaged they are with your product on a daily basis.

There are a number of ways you can measure product adoption. One method is to divide the number of daily active users who log into an account by the total number of purchased licenses on the account. This can also be calculated on a weekly or monthly basis.

Formula: active users/licenses

Another approach to measuring product adoption is to focus on time spent in-app. You can calculate the average time spent in-app per login by dividing the total amount of active time spent in-app per week by the total number of logins per week.

Formula: total time spent/# of logins

A third approach is to focus on feature adoption. To calculate feature adoption rate, take the number of times the feature is accessed per week and divide by the number of logins per week. This will also showcase the expanding adoption and stickiness of your product. It can help you identify the core features of your product that your customers find the most value in.

Formula: # feature is accessed/logins per week

3. Stakeholder Engagement

Stakeholder engagement considers the engagement of all stakeholders in your app. This includes not only license users and product users, but also others involved with your client’s use of your product, such as managers, owners, and budgeting directors. Keeping these stakeholders satisfied is an important part of client satisfaction which goes beyond what you can tell from license utilization or product adoption.

To measure stakeholder engagement, you can identify key contacts at your client’s company and track how frequently they engaged you or your product over the past 30 days. You can create a consistent set of stakeholder roles across your entire customer base and segment by variables such as type of engagement, engagement flow, the reason for engagement, or engagement by role. To illustrate with a very basic example of tracking type of engagement, you might track how often stakeholders attend scheduled meetings over the course of a month. In contrast, you can track meeting cancellations or no-shows, which could be an indicator of a churn risk.

4. Customer Health Score

Customer health score combines multiple metrics into an overall measure of engagement and satisfaction which helps you predict how likely an account is to renew or churn. A common misconception is that customer health is calculated with a single score like NPS. A true customer health score is a combination of metrics. It consolidates data on variables such as license utilization, product usage, customer success outcomes, customer feedback, and support volume. For the most accurate customer health scores, customize each based on your customer segments. Different types of customers want different things. The aggregated result is displayed as a color code. Green indicates an account is doing well, while yellow indicates underperformance and red indicates that the account requires attention to avoid churn. Understanding the importance of why an account is in either green, yellow or red can help your team know which actions to take to improve their overall health score.

Customer health score is calculated using a complex algorithm. The best way to track it is to use Totango tools with customer health score tracking built-in, such as the Customer 360 SuccessBLOC module.

5. Customer Sentiment Indicators

Customer sentiment reflects engagement and can help track it. The best indicators of customer sentiment is Net Promoter Score (NPS), CSAT and how your team perceives the customer’s sentiment.

NPS measures how likely a customer is to promote you to family and friends.

To measure NPS, you survey your customers with a question where they can reply on a scale of 0 to 10, such as, “How likely is it you would recommend us to a friend?” Answers are divided into scores of 9 or 10, which are classified as “promoters”, 7 to 8, which are factored out as “passives”, and below 7, which are identified as “detractors.” Take the percentage of respondents who are promoters and subtract the percentage of detractors to get NPS. Your score can range from 100 for all promoters to -100 for all detractors. Totango provides a SuccessBLOC specially designed for tracking Net Promoter Score.

6. Support Metrics

Another important type of engagement to track is customer support metrics. Customer support KPIs can tell you a range of information about your customers. For example, a high volume of support tickets reflecting difficulty with onboarding may be a warning sign portending low adoption and high churn. On the other hand, questions related to product features may be a positive sign that customers are actively using a product.

You can track support both by measuring sheer ticket volume per customer and by segmenting specific support issues. For example, you might identify how often a customer’s support tickets were resolved on first contact or the average response time for resolution. In contrast, you could measure how long a support ticket has been open, which can be proportional to a customer’s frustration. Or you might use your customer journey map to divide support issues into onboarding, adoption and renewal issues.

Manage Your User Engagement Metrics to Maximize Your Revenue

Essential metrics to monitor include those measuring how actively customers and stakeholders are engaged with your product, how satisfied and enthusiastic they are about their experience with you and what type of support issues they’re experiencing. Knowing this information can help you evaluate how successful your customer engagement efforts are so you can take appropriate measures to promote effective strategies and correct underperforming areas. By using your metrics to promote better engagement, you can deter churn, increase retention and maximize revenue.

The Totango Spark customer success platform helps you track your most important engagement metrics by providing built-in best-practice templates, toolkits and campaigns including dashboards and reports for monitoring essential KPIs. By doing this, your team can proactively take the proper actions to engage users who appear to be unengaged. This ensures that no customers are left behind. Try it free to experience how easy it can be to manage your most important engagement metrics.