#TrueblueTips | What Customer Engagement Score is and how it is calculated

CES: A metric for the all-round monitoring of customer interactions in a multichannel perspective  

When we talk about Customer Engagement, we refer to the willingness of companies to establish a relationship with their audience, capable of the users’ choices. Trueblue’s CES was created for this reason and is configured as a combined metric that allows for an all-round monitoring of customer interactions and for the planning of customer engagement by providing an integrated view across multiple channels. The metric combines several elements, such as the number of interaction channels, channel context, frequency, enrichment and impact of the engagement itself.

The User is the King 

In this perspective, the user, unlike what happened about 30 years ago, is no longer the passive actor of Top Down, unidirectional marketing campaigns and messages, but becomes an active subject, capable of guiding and being guided through bidirectional communication logics where companies are the interlocutors of an increasingly dynamic and inclusive dialogue.

The cornerstone of this dialogue is an increasingly digital marketing activity, which today more than ever needs a metric for an all-round monitoring of customer interactions from a multichannel perspective. In all industries, including Healthcare, the need for direct contact with end users, with the potential users of a product or a service, no longer involves a single channel with a single message, but is articulated at multiple levels, in different moments and with different messages depending on the context.

The classic TV commercial on the importance of Vitamin C dietary supplement in the months of January – March, is followed, in the following Quarter, by the same type of content but with a different message and a different product that focuses on the need to avoid the symptoms of tiredness caused by the summer heat. This is just one of the many ways to convey the message and the product and to trigger the necessity according to the needs of the end user. Activities on sector media, Social Media Plans and action by Reps in the points of sale will be added to the television channel. 

Angelini Pharma’s #maseifuori Case 

Let’s take the example of industry leader Angelini Pharma, which just closed a $960M deal to acquire Arvelle Therapeutics.  

Whoever follows Angelini’s marketing activities is perceiving, especially in the recent period, an increasing use of the social media channel. The campaign #maseifuori, for example, has seen among others the involvement of the Influencer Andrea De Logu (@AndreaLa Rossa) and other Brand Ambassadors with the common goal not only to inform about the company’s products for Schizophrenia, but above all to convey a social commitment to disseminate information and valuable content on a sensitive topic such as Schizophrenia. 

This proves the growing importance of multichannel in all market sectors and the need to go beyond the classic approach that assumes that certain marketing actions are effective only in specific industries. As a matter of fact, if this approach may be sometimes correct, the truth is that in marketing and, more generally, in customer engagement processes, it is and will always be data & numbers, that speak for themselves. 

So, how do we calculate (CES) Customer Engagement Score? 

We introduced the topic by saying that CES is a metric for the all-round monitoring of customer interactions in a multichannel perspective. Well, the starting point of this measurement is the mapping of all components of the multichannel process and its enablers (tools, processes, segmentations, customer journey). Each channel is then associated with a specific role and weight within what will be defined as the Multichannel Vision of the Brand. All this in order to define and validate the relevant “Success KPIs” for each channel involved. 

Consider the concrete example of a pharmaceutical company that identifies DEM & Marketing Automation, Point of Sale actions and Field Force actions as the main channels of its multi-channel strategy. 

Each of these channels will be assigned a weight that, through a Customer Engagement Engine, will calculate the “Weighted Interactions“. In this specific case, the Weighted Interaction for the DEM & Marketing Automation channel will certainly be higher in the case of a clicked email and lower in the case of an email that is simply opened.   

Afterwards, the various Weighted Interactions will be combined with the help of Artificial Intelligence technologies and then return a synthetic indicator, easily readable and valid for strategic considerations regarding the effectiveness of each channel.  In this way it is easier to identify the future investment to be allocated to each channel in order to optimize the ROI and the general performance of each activity. 

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

The best conclusion to this brief analysis is a quote from the American writer Gregg Easterbook, which we believe is particularly appropriate for conveying the value of numbers and data in general. Customer Engagement Score, in fact, is the result of a symbolic “torture” on masses of big data that is often not analyzed enough or not analyzed at all due to its complexity.  Yet the all-round monitoring of customer interactions from a multichannel perspective is not something we can ignore, let alone underestimate, and today more than ever, it needs to be interpreted accurately and easily so as to be transformed into increasingly customer-centric strategic actions.