You probably already know that customer engagement and customer experience refer to distinct strategies. But have you ever imagined not using one of them?
Given the high churn rates in SaaS, confusing the two terms (or worse, not using them properly) can lead to shallow fixes. For instance, a great customer experience alone will do little if the customers aren't engaged enough to actually perceive value.
In this customer engagement vs. customer experience guide, you'll learn about the complex distinctions between the two—with examples to demonstrate where they overlap and how they're unique. You'll then know what's missing from your own strategy for achieving business success and boosting customer engagement and satisfaction.
Customer engagement refers to the interactions customers have with your brand across all channels, including within the app, through email, or via customer support.
Generally, customer engagement involves active participation from a user. They'll engage through clicks, feature usage, and feedback. In fact, strong customer engagement is defined by how often these engagement actions happen, what their quality is, and how recently they occurred.
Customer engagement drives product stickiness and turns users into loyal customers by facilitating frequent use of vital features. Engaged users also tend to explore and adopt the product, expanding the way they use the tool and being more open to upsell opportunities.
Looking at the earliest interactions a user has with your product, engagement fuels onboarding by helping new users realize value quickly. Simply put, they'll find it easier to discover new features and stay engaged in the process too.
Most importantly, you can use customer engagement as a tool to predict retention. If active and engaged customers are more likely to stay, you're almost guaranteed long-term revenue.
Customer experience refers to every touchpoint in the customer journey—from sign-up to support. It includes emotions, perceptions, and expectations but focuses more on how easy it is for people to use an app, how satisfied they are with the experience, and how seamless the interactions appear.
A positive customer experience builds the very basis for customer loyalty.
Happy customers are less likely to leave when they see you listen to customer needs and get customers involved in improving the app. But a stellar customer experience doesn’t just keep users. You can and should use it to build a stronger, more reliable brand that more people will trust and consider.
This ripple effect? You'll have lower customer acquisition costs, as happy customers are a perfect addition to loyalty programs should you want to expand your business by actively involving customers in that process.
Plus, a strong customer experience strategy ties tightly to metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) to gauge advocacy and Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) to reflect on long-term revenue potential.
Engagement is what users do.
Engagement-related actions can be something like logging in, navigating onboarding, or looking at a feature announcement. Consider engagement as what you use to measure every single interaction a person has with your SaaS product.
Experience is how users feel about what they do.
Think of this as their emotional reaction or simply how they feel when and after using your app. For instance, valuable customer feedback will give you a close look at the user experience and how people feel when it comes to a feature, workflow, announcements, or even the customer service you provide.
The same event, such as an in-app walkthrough, can give off positive engagement cues (when the user completes it) and also create a positive customer experience (if they perceive it as helpful). With SaaS tools though, this duality can get confusing.
Just take onboarding flows: A user can complete all onboarding steps (this indicates high engagement) but be just as lost within the interface as before (this highlights a poor customer experience).
Likewise, a feature announcement can generate a lot of clicks (this indicates high engagement). Still, it can be annoying to some users if it appears too often or is not delivered at the right time (this highlights a poor customer experience). This said, both customer experience and customer engagement matter. Next is why.
SaaS teams shouldn't choose between customer engagement and customer experience.
Engagement without experience will never be able to help you retain users. People would just be clicking around a clunky interface just because they truly need its functionality. When an app that's easier to use and has the same features comes around, they'll leave.
Experience without engagement is also frankly not worthwhile. Sure, your app might be easy to use, but this doesn't guarantee people will stick with it.
When brilliant customer engagement meets stellar customer experience, customers will love using your product because it's both user-friendly and handy.
If your SaaS tool were to primarily rely on in-app messaging to clarify or announce features, you could get rid of the confusion that new customers may have to deal with when it comes to complex features.
You could then follow up with an email nudge to remind the users to use that feature. By the end of this multichannel approach, your user should have mastered the feature without too much effort from their end. They'll also feel supported and be more likely to use and recommend your product to others.
On their own, both engagement and experience fail to produce such results.
Let's cover three main pitfalls that come from keeping the two strategies disjointed and how to avoid them.
The biggest problems occur when in-app messaging, for instance, does one thing while the interface signals another. One way to fix this is by making sure all of your customer touchpoints are connected.
So a beautiful design alone, without any prompts for action, may go unused. Try to balance the two by establishing key performance indicators for both ends of the spectrum.
When product managers are chasing clicks while marketing leaders simply want to get their messaging and positioning right, they'll naturally focus on different goals. Work towards building stronger, cross-functional departments that can share the same objectives like customer retention.
Appcues not only improves customer engagement and creates a positive customer experience but also lets you combine the two concepts. With a complete platform to help you deliver multi-channel messaging, Appcues can turn disjointed touchpoints into memorable customer journeys.
Appcues uses a combination of in-app messaging, email, and push notifications to help you meet your customers exactly where they are, at the most appropriate times. This way, you won't be pushing too many messages in front of your users, but you'll be able to coordinate the most essential information.
Let's imagine you have to launch a new feature over the course of a week.
You'd first send out an in-app modal that announces the feature launch. An email sent the next day (for the same user) or the same day (to users who haven't seen the in-app messages) can show them more details on using that feature. A push notification will also remind them to explore that same feature.
Each channel builds upon the last, creating one cohesive narrative that drives action without overcommunication.
Appcues lets you use product data to deliver a personalized experience. The platform lets you keep a close eye on what your users are doing when they're in your product so you can determine what the best outreach method is in any particular case.
Thanks to its no-code tracking and analysis platform, you won't have to ask your devs to set up anything. We handle it all so you can focus on developing campaigns in minutes.
Appcues will also let you trigger in-app tooltips and hotspots at the right moment to show users what they should do next. Follow this up with an email or a push notification to remind them to finish.
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You need a clear audit process to properly blend customer engagement and customer experience into a successful SaaS strategy.
This four-step framework supports decision-makers in identifying gaps in their approach, focusing their efforts, and progressing:
Start by getting a general view of every stage—signup, onboarding, feature usage, subscription renewal. Based on these, document all your users' interactions (in-app flows, emails, support chat).
Find the most important moments that will help you influence the two. Welcome emails, onboarding tours, or feature nudges can all let you identify engagement and experience metrics to see where you're getting double-duty.
Start by evaluating customer experience. Is it intuitive, helpful, or frustrating? Rate it on a scale of 1-5. Then, do the same for customer engagement. Does it prompt action? Rate it on a similar 1-5 scale. Anything got a low score? That's exactly what you should prioritize next.
Use Appcues to track in-app behavior and Hotjar for sentiment monitoring. Gather insights from different channels by integrating with an email platform like Customer.io.
There are plenty of options here, but you can start tracking engagement KPIs by activation rate, usage of features, or frequency of sessions. Measure experience using Net Promoter Score, Customer Satisfaction, and churn rate.
Customer engagement and customer experience are interrelated and should be prioritized together, although they refer to different things.
Engagement reflects measurable interactions taken by the user, such as logins and features used.
Meanwhile, experience refers to a product user's emotional response to what they engaged with. You'll want to focus on engagement to drive product usage and experience to build trust and customer satisfaction.
Companies that grow and keep their users always double down on both of the two facets. Measuring and improving your engagement experience strategy is another important consideration to add to this.
At Appcues, we support SaaS teams by providing a seamless experience and measuring and improving behavior-driven experiences.
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