Customer Engagement vs Customer Experience

Userpilot Team
6 min readJul 10, 2024

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You’ve probably heard the terms customer engagement and customer experience used interchangeably. The confusion makes sense, too, since the two concepts are similar, with both aiming to build customer loyalty.

However, they’re not the same.

Customer engagement focuses on active interactions between customers and your brand, while customer experience looks at the overall feelings a customer has throughout their entire journey.

So, customer engagement vs. customer experience, which one should you prioritize? Let’s dive in to find out, along with useful metrics to track and tips on implementation as well.

TL;DR

What is customer engagement?

Customer engagement is the process of nurturing long-term relationships between customers and your brand.

In other words, customer engagement gauges how effectively your business attracts and sustains a customer’s interest over time across multiple touchpoints.

Focusing on customer engagement helps drive retention, revenue growth, and customer advocacy. Let’s look at an example to see how you can improve engagement.

Suppose a customer makes a purchase online. Instead of simply sending a confirmation email, go a step further to boost engagement post-purchase. Share additional helpful content, like a product tutorial, product usage best practices, exclusive offers, etc.

By creating such personalized interactions, you build a positive customer experience, which leads to satisfied customers who stick around for longer.

Customer engagement vs customer experience
Track customer engagement with Userpilot.

What is customer experience?

Customer experience refers to customers’ feelings about their interactions with your brand across various channels, online and offline, throughout the customer journey.

These interactions range from initial awareness, through purchase and onboarding, to continuous support, and potential expansion.

Focusing on customer experience is crucial because it directly impacts customer loyalty and satisfaction.

To improve customer experience, try introducing a user-friendly interface, easy navigation, personalized onboarding, and timely customer support.

Such changes result in positive experiences that fulfill customer expectations, leading to higher lifetime value (LTV) and greater profitability.

It should be noted that customer experience differs from customer service. While customer service includes all the help provided throughout the customer journey, customer experience reflects how customers perceive their interactions with your business.

Customer experience dashboard
Customer experience analytics with Userpilot.

Customer engagement vs customer experience: The key differences

Having established the basics of both customer engagement and customer experience, it’s time to dig deep into the main differences between them.

Definition and scope

Customer engagement:

  • Definition: Customer engagement involves ongoing customer interactions with your brand across various channels, designed to build relationships and boost loyalty.
  • Scope: Focused on nurturing and maintaining customer relationships. Looks at how much (and in what ways) customers actively interact with your company.

Customer experience:

  • Definition: Customer experience refers to the overall impression customers have about interacting with your brand.
  • Scope: Broader scope, covering all customer interactions and perceptions throughout the customer journey. Looks at how customers feel about their experience with your brand from start to finish.

Measurement and metrics

Customer engagement:

Common metrics for measuring customer engagement include:

Feature engagement tracking
Feature engagement dashboard in Userpilot.

Customer experience:

You can measure customer experience by collecting qualitative and quantitative data.

For qualitative measures, use interviews, usability testing, and surveys asking users to provide valuable customer feedback. Such data helps understand customer behavior and uncover improvement areas.

For quantitative measures, some key metrics are:

Customer experience analysis
Funnel analysis to gauge customer experience.

Goals and objectives

Churn prevention analysis
Prevent churn to maximize engagement.

Timeframe and focus

Implementation

Customer engagement:

You can choose different tactical actions for implementation, such as:

Loyal customer engagement campaign
Loyalty programs for greater engagement.

Customer experience:

Implementing positive experiences requires a more holistic approach, involving various departments to cover all touchpoints. This includes working with sales and marketing teams to:

Resource center
Customize your resource center in Userpilot.

Customer satisfaction vs. customer engagement vs customer experience

In conversations about customer engagement vs customer experience, there is a third concept frequently mentioned as well — customer satisfaction. However, despite all three terms focusing on the same goal of increased customer retention and product growth, they are vastly different.

Customer experience NPS dashboard
NPS scores to measure customer experience.

Conclusion

Clearly, for long-term business success, you need to focus on both an effective customer engagement strategy and a positive customer experience.

That being said, don’t forget that the two are distinct terms.

Customer engagement emphasizes ongoing interactions and fostering relationships. In contrast, customer experience gauges how customers perceive these interactions while focusing on a seamless journey across channels.

Want to get started improving customer engagement and customer experience? Get a Userpilot Demo and see how you can achieve better results.

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Userpilot Team
Userpilot Team

Written by Userpilot Team

Userpilot is a Product Growth Platform designed to help product teams improve product metrics through in-app experiences without code. Check out userpilot.com

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