Daily Research News Online no. 1096 - Gallup Research Metric for Customer Engagement

Gallup Research Metric for Customer Engagement

August 31 2001

Holding onto a customer has never been harder. The latest Gallup research shows that the key to wooing customers isn't price or even product, but emotion. To monitor this, Gallup has devised a new 11-question metric of 'customer engagement.'

Much marketing effort today is concerned with the search for the ties that bind customers to brands. Loyal customers represent a company's best prospects for pumping capital into a business. Unlike stock appreciation, which can fluctuate wildly over the short and medium term, loyal customers can be counted on to build a solid base of revenues as well as to expand profits.

In addition, such customers are likely to try new offerings and to provide strong word-of-mouth for a brand, saving companies advertising and product-assessment costs. So it's not surprising that customer loyalty ranks so highly.

Assistance can be had from Gallup's 11-question metric of 'customer engagement,' called CE11. This system measures rational formulations of loyalty according to three key factors (L3):

Overall satisfaction.
Intent to repurchase.
Intent to recommend.

The scheme also adds eight measures of emotional attachment (A8). Gallup developed these questions as paired indicators of four emotional states:

confidence in a brand.
belief in its integrity.
pride in the brand.
passion for the brand.

Any analysis of responses to these questions will reveal that customers develop emotional attachment to a brand in a cumulative way. Customers who agreed strongly with the first two statements of the A8 were more likely to agree with the next two, and so on.

To date, Gallup has surveyed 3,611 customers in six industries using this CE11 metric. Surprisingly, researching across diverse industries has shown that the proportion of emotionally attached consumers is remarkably consistent.

Belief in a brand's integrity occurs when a customer can count on getting reliable service and knows that someone will make amends if the service is not up to scratch. High scores on pride questions also indicates that a customer has crossed a threshold of commitment to the brand. In turn, that level of attachment corresponds to growing revenues, and proves that the provisionally satisfied customer has been turned into an emotionally engaged one.

All articles 2006-22 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas unless otherwise stated.