When Does Customer Engagement Become Customer Engineering?

Every organisation wants customers to engage.

That seems entirely reasonable.

We want people to:

• Use the service.
• Find what they need.
• Participate.
• Communicate.
• Return.
• Recommend it to others.
• Build relationships with the organisation.

So we measure engagement.

And that is where something interesting begins to happen.

Because once engagement becomes a measure of success, the organisation has an incentive to produce more of it.

The question can quietly change from:

Are customers getting value from this interaction?

to:

How can we increase the amount of interaction?

Those are not necessarily the same objective.

When the measure becomes the objective

Imagine an executive team reviewing digital performance.

The dashboard looks familiar.

• Active users.
• Return visits.
• Time spent.
• Messages.
• Responses.
• Shares.
• Connections.
• Clicks.
• Retention.

Each measure tells the organisation something useful.

But what happens when improving those numbers becomes the objective?

If success means more time spent, there is an incentive to keep people there longer.

If success means more interactions, there is an incentive to create more reasons to interact.

If success means more return visits, there is an incentive to create more reasons to return.

If success means more responses, there is an incentive to present more things likely to generate a response.

Nobody needs to say:

Let’s manipulate our customers.

The measurement itself can create the incentive.

Engagement and value are not the same thing

Consider two customers.

One opens a digital service, finds exactly what is needed, completes the task and leaves after two minutes.

Another spends twenty minutes moving between different parts of the service, responds to several prompts and eventually leaves.

Which customer had the better experience?

We do not know.

But a conventional engagement dashboard might tell us that the second customer was considerably more engaged.

That exposes an important problem.

What is good for the engagement metric may not necessarily be good for the customer.

The first customer may have experienced exceptional service.

The second may simply have generated more measurable activity.

If leadership cannot distinguish between those outcomes, increasing engagement can begin to replace creating value.

When facilitating interaction becomes producing interaction

This matters particularly in digital environments built around human interaction.

Originally, the objective might be simple:

Help people communicate.

Help people discover something.

Help people participate.

Help people maintain relationships.

But once interaction itself becomes commercially valuable, the organisation has another possible objective:

Create more interaction.

That can appear entirely rational.

More interaction may mean better retention.

Better retention may mean more revenue.

More activity may create more commercial opportunity.

The danger is not necessarily the commercial objective.

The danger is losing sight of the distinction between facilitating behaviour people chose and designing systems intended to produce behaviour the organisation wants.

That boundary can be surprisingly difficult to see from inside the business.

More is not always better

Most organisations understand this principle everywhere except digital.

We would not automatically assume that a customer spending twice as long completing a banking transaction represented success.

We would not celebrate a customer needing twice as many interactions with a call centre.

We would not design a supermarket deliberately requiring customers to walk through the same aisle four times before finding what they wanted.

Efficiency can be an indicator of good service.

Yet digital experiences can sometimes reverse that logic.

More time.

More activity.

More responses.

More visits.

More interactions.

More engagement.

But more of what?

And for whose benefit?

The problem may start in the boardroom

It is tempting to regard this as a design problem.

Perhaps it isn’t.

A product team asked to increase engagement will design for engagement.

A marketing team measured on return visits will seek return visits.

A digital team measured on active users will seek activity.

A commercial team rewarded for conversion will seek conversion.

The people designing the experience are responding to the outcomes the organisation has asked them to produce.

That makes this a leadership question.

Executives determine what matters.

Organisations translate those priorities into measures.

Measures become targets.

Targets influence decisions.

Decisions shape customer experiences.

The interface may be where the customer experiences the result.

But the incentive may have originated much higher in the organisation.

What are we actually trying to achieve?

This suggests a deceptively simple question for leadership teams:

What should a successful customer interaction look like?

Perhaps it means the customer accomplished something.

Perhaps the customer discovered something useful.

Perhaps a problem was solved.

Perhaps a meaningful connection was made.

Perhaps trust increased.

Perhaps the customer simply experienced something worth returning to.

Those are measures of value.

They are not necessarily measures of activity.

That distinction matters because a company producing genuine value should not necessarily need to manufacture additional reasons for customers to interact.

The value itself becomes the reason to return.

For a greenfield business

A new digital business has an extraordinary opportunity.

It can decide how success will be measured before conventional engagement measures become embedded in its culture.

Instead of asking:

How many times did the customer return?

It can ask:

Why did the customer return?

Instead of:

How long did the customer stay?

It can ask:

Did the customer accomplish what they came to do?

Instead of:

How many interactions did we generate?

It can ask:

Were those interactions valuable?

Instead of simply measuring activity, it can measure outcomes.

That distinction can influence the entire business model.

Because the organisation begins with customer value rather than trying to infer customer value from customer activity.

For existing organisations

For established organisations, the challenge is different.

Engagement measures may already be deeply embedded.

• Retention.
• Daily activity.
• Return frequency.
• Notifications.
• Recommendations.
• Personalisation.
• Conversion.
• Time spent.

There may be perfectly legitimate reasons for measuring every one of them.

The leadership challenge is not necessarily to remove them.

It is to understand what behaviour they encourage inside the organisation.

Ask:

What decisions are being made because this number needs to increase?

What changes are being made to the customer experience?

What behaviour are those changes intended to produce?

And then:

Does producing that behaviour create value for the customer, or primarily value for us?

Sometimes the answer will be both.

Sometimes it may not.

Leadership needs to know the difference.

What if the customer wants to leave?

There is an even simpler test.

Imagine the customer has accomplished exactly what they came to do.

Should the service let them leave?

This sounds almost absurd.

Of course it should.

But consider how many common measures benefit if the customer does something else first.

One more article.

One more product.

One more notification.

One more recommendation.

One more connection.

One more video.

One more interaction.

From the organisation’s perspective, every additional interaction might improve a metric.

From the customer’s perspective, the interaction may already have successfully ended.

A business genuinely designed around human autonomy needs to be comfortable with that.

Sometimes leaving is the successful outcome.

Customer relationships should be earned

There is a profound difference between a customer returning because the organisation continues to create value and a customer returning because the organisation has become exceptionally effective at generating return behaviour.

One builds a relationship around value.

The other risks building a relationship around behavioural optimisation.

That distinction becomes particularly important when organisations talk about customer loyalty.

Perhaps loyalty is not something technology should manufacture.

Perhaps it is something businesses should earn.

Through usefulness.

Through quality.

Through service.

Through relevance.

Through trust.

Through continuing to create something worth returning to.

A question for leaders

Look at the measures used to determine whether your digital customer experience is successful.

Then ask:

If we stopped measuring how much people interacted with us, how would we know whether we were creating value for them?

If there is a clear answer, the organisation probably understands what customers actually receive from the relationship.

If the answer depends principally upon engagement itself, another question becomes necessary:

Have we built a business that creates customer value, or one that has become exceptionally good at generating customer behaviour?

That is the adoption question behind ICCA and Social Interaction Design.

It does not argue that engagement is bad.

It asks whether engagement should be treated as evidence of customer value when the organisation itself may be actively designing the conditions that produce that engagement.

The underlying ICCA work is openly shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence, encouraging discussion, challenge, adaptation and further development.

Perhaps the best digital relationship is not one where technology creates the greatest possible amount of interaction.

Perhaps it is one where the organisation creates enough genuine value that people choose the interaction for themselves.

#ICCA #CustomerEngagement #CustomerExperience #HumanAutonomy #DigitalTrust #HumanCentredDesign #BehaviouralDesign #CustomerValue #ResponsibleTechnology #Leadership