Customer Engagement vs. Customer Experience: What’s the Difference?

Every customer values a good experience.

And when businesses fail to deliver on this, it damages their reputation.

Customer confidence is built on strong relationships and exceptional experiences. Companies must proactively and thoughtfully engage customers, putting their needs at the center of every decision.

There are several customer engagement and customer experience (CX) strategies that can help. In this article, we’ll dive into how they’re different for brands.

Customer Engagement vs. Customer Experience: Comparing Their Primary Focus

Customer engagement and customer experience are not the same thing, but they are pieces of the same puzzle.

Customer engagement encompasses every interaction a customer has with a brand, reflecting the strength of their connection with that brand. These interactions include but are not limited to, comments, shares, and website visits.

Customer experience, on the other hand, is the experience a customer has with a brand across all touchpoints. It starts with the first interaction and continues as you build a long-term relationship. CX reflects a customer’s overall perspective of your brand.

Walt Disney once said, “Do it so well that when people see you do it, they will want to come back and see you do it again, and they will want to bring others and show them how well you do what you do.”

To achieve this, you need both engagement and CX best practices.

Here’s how customer engagement and CX differ at a basic level:

• Customer engagement: Focuses on short-term interactions like customer service calls and email communication. Engagement seeks to initiate interaction with a customer while capturing their attention.
• Customer experience: Aims to streamline a customer’s entire journey with a brand while focusing on long-term relationship building.

Effective customer engagement leads to exemplary CX.

Customer engagement strategies involve various aspects, like actively communicating with customers or seeking their feedback. Implementing their feedback lets you build a solid connection. However, customer engagement goes beyond communication. It also involves active listening, personalizing responses, and measuring customer behavior. Several customer engagement tools help you take care of these aspects.

Customer experience comes from satisfactory customer engagement. Of course, only the customer knows what’s satisfactory for them. To deliver an exceptional CX, it’s important to understand and meet your customers’ expectations.

According to a Forbes 2024 survey, 81% of customers value personalized experiences and prefer to do business with companies that offer them. Simply put, personalized CX means higher customer satisfaction. For some brands, it also means being genuine and understanding customers well.

Customer Engagement vs. Customer Experience: What It Means for Employees

Employees naturally participate in delivering engagement and CX. Some do this more actively than others as part of their day-to-day roles.

What does customer engagement mean for employees?

The responsibility of proactively engaging customers falls mainly on marketing, customer support, and customer service employees.

Marketing teams run email campaigns, answer customer queries on social media, and set important push notifications. Meanwhile, the customer service team answers customer queries or takes sync calls with larger accounts to proactively engage customers on various issues.

These teams are more involved than others in engaging customers. Often, accounting and finance teams also participate in customer engagement while sending automated payment reminders or new invoices.

Every interaction your company has with customers is part of customer engagement. Great companies make sure these interactions are always consistent and meaningful.

What does customer experience mean for employees?

Although some teams are more involved in running customer engagement initiatives, customer experience requires the participation of the whole company.

The best customer experience comes from a customer-centric approach. Sales, finance, marketing, product, and ops teams must all strive to keep activities customer-focused.

CX encompasses a customer’s entire experience with a brand. To deliver a positive CX, you need all teams to align their objectives toward a single goal. This keeps all your teams focused on the customer, creating an experience for which they would return.

Customer Engagement vs. Customer Experience: What It Means for Brands

Customer experience and engagement are directly associated with a brand’s success. Let’s look at how brands see them differently.

What does customer engagement mean for brands?

Customer engagement shows how relevant a brand is for customers and how actively it connects with buyers. Brands measure engagement with the help of different metrics:

• Likes
• Shares
• Comments
• Interaction rate
• Clicks
• Email opens
• Form submissions

The metrics you adopt will depend on your business type and the channels you use. For example, a marketing agency might have WhatsApp interactions as a key customer engagement metric in an area where WhatsApp is a popular messaging application. Meanwhile, LinkedIn or mobile app interactions would be of more value to businesses in different sectors.

What does customer experience mean for brands?

While customer engagement metrics might be channel-specific, based on your customers’ location or the type of business, CX reflects long-term satisfaction, customer loyalty, and brand perception. These long-term metrics allow brands to track how well they can retain customers and how likely their loyal customers are to advocate for them.

Many brands use metrics to measure CX:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): Asks customers to rate a quality or aspect of business on a scale of 0 to 10.
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Analyzes how happy customers are with a service or interaction.
• Referrals: Reflect the number of potential buyers your satisfied customers are bringing in.

All of these are long-term measurements of a brand’s CX. For example, “Above 76” is a good example of an NPS benchmark for a B2B consulting firm.

Source: Retently

If a business’s NPS is above the benchmark post-purchase and gets good referrals, the brand will likely have a positive CX.

Why Customer Engagement and Customer Experience Are Equally Important

Both CX and customer engagement are critical to a business’s success.

Customer engagement drives interaction, and experience builds loyalty

A customer in isolation cannot experience a brand’s true potential. Customer engagement initiatives drive customers out of isolation, encouraging them to interact more actively. These initiatives capture customers’ initial attention while bringing them into the fold, setting the foundation for a relationship you and the customer will cherish for years to come.

When you pair engagement initiatives with customer experience strategies, the relationship flourishes, fostering brand loyalty. Given the right CX nurturing, customers first become promoters and later advocates, helping potential buyers see and hear their support for the brand. This creates social proof for your brand and positive word-of-mouth in the marketplace, making purchasing decisions much easier for potential buyers.

Improving both maximizes growth

CX and customer engagement work together to create synergy. Maintaining this synergy and scaling it further helps grow your business. Customer engagement enables you to understand what buyers interact with the most. You can optimize or scale that aspect or engagement strategy to increase conversions.

As more buyers enter your customer base, an outstanding customer experience will initiate a long-term relationship with them. This is crucial for businesses, especially in a sector that depends on repeat purchases and subscriptions.

The result is higher customer retention, reduced churn, greater satisfaction, and, ultimately, high lifetime value.

Pairing proactive and reactive strategies

Engagement is a proactive strategy that focuses on attracting customers and stimulating interaction. It uses personalized marketing campaigns and proactive customer outreach programs to build and retain customers.

CX is a reactive strategy that guarantees all interactions meet or exceed customer needs. It includes reactive strategies for dealing with customer concerns and providing exceptional service.

When you pair proactive and reactive strategies together, you create a memorable customer life cycle in your business.

How Nextiva’s Unified CXM Software Helps Achieve Both

Nextiva’s unified customer experience management software helps brands automate strategic customer engagement while setting the stage for exceptional CX. It centralizes all interactions, giving you one platform on which to track and manage customer communications.

This centralized approach keeps you aware of the context regardless of the channel you use to interact with customers. It ensures consistency in communication and allows all teams to deliver CX according to the required standard. The platform also comes with omnichannel capabilities that make customer engagement easier while respecting their preferences.

With Nextiva, you can visualize the customer journey by integrating with customer data and analytics platforms. Seeing the various stages of the journey lets you identify areas where your CX needs improvement and helps you make strategic changes to increase satisfaction. The software also delivers real-time analytics, providing you with engagement insights you can use in your interactions, helping to drive improvement.

Nextiva’s platform measures customer satisfaction and interaction quality based on feedback, delivering valuable insights to optimize strategies that take the overall customer experience to the next level.

Learn more about Nextiva’s unified CXM platform to give your customers the best engagement and experience. 👇