Engagement is frequently identified as a leading indicator of ROI. It’s the measure of a customer or employee’s involvement and commitment to the company or brand, while satisfaction is the measurement of recalled service delivery against a prescribed set of drivers.
The differences are subtle, but important:
• Engaged customers are more likely to be involved in the company: more loyal, committed, likely to excuse error, likely to return, likely to refer, and likely to spend more.
• Disengaged customers on the other hand, while possibly satisfied, are brand-ambivalent, or worse active campaigners against your service.
• Engaged employees are more likely to be involved in the company: more loyal, and likely to stay longer.
• Disengaged employees may very well be satisfied with elements of their work, but fail to contribute the discretionary effort required to deliver outstanding service.
• Disengaged employees can impact the engagement level of customers, and vice versa.
Net:
While traditional satisfaction surveys are helpful tools to isolate and improve performance, there is not necessarily a correlation between engagement and satisfaction. Not measuring customer or employee engagement can lead managers down the path of false positives – assuming that all is well with the business, yet market share and other key indicators could be about to take a tumble.
We advocate an annual survey of the engagement of clients and staff, along with satisfaction/incident tracking surveys, as management deems necessary to facilitate performance improvement.
We just released a whitepaper that outlines a process by which managers can maximize organizational performance improvement planning, by bringing together the engagement statistics of both the customer and employee engagement surveys, to define a process that is most efficient for the organization.
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