Well tuned and calibrated surveys, coded free-form responses (takes care to implement), net promoter scores, heck, at scale it might make sense to hire polling agencies to do this.
But what if I want to know why you're not using my product every moment of every day, and what I'd have to change to do that?
If you're satisfied with my product, but you only buy it once a year, that's bad for me. If you're not very satisfied with my product, but you buy it 30 times a year, that's better.
I'd rather have 30 sales than 1 sale, even if you badmouth my product and lose me 15 more sales down the line.
TBH I may not give a crap how "happy" you are if you're still engaging.
> But what if I want to know why you're not using my product every moment of every day
Did you try asking me?
> and what I'd have to change to do that?
Again, did you try asking me?
> If you're satisfied with my product, but you only buy it once a year, that's bad for me. If you're not very satisfied with my product, but you buy it 30 times a year, that's better.
If I'm satisfied with your product what makes you think I'd be more satisfied with it if I had to buy it multiple times per year?
> I'd rather have 30 sales than 1 sale, even if you badmouth my product and lose me 15 more sales down the line.
You assume every sale is the same price. If you sell your product to 30 people, are those 30 people generating the same amount of revenue as the 15 people could have if they were more satisfied with your product?
> TBH I may not give a crap how "happy" you are if you're still engaging.
That is, in a nutshell, exactly why I'm not satisfied with many online products and have actively disengaged from them. Your line of thinking leads down a road where the end user is nothing except a source of income to you. You've completely forgotten that you're supposed to provide a service for humans. It shows a complete lack of respect of users' intent and instead you wish to push users to generate more money for you potentially at the cost of the users themselves.
My line of thinking is what makes companies profitable.
You can moralize all you want, but the incentives align for a company to maximize on profitability, not on "hey my customers like me". You can't pay for dinner with goodwill, but you can pay for dinner with money.
If I'm being so disrespectful, why is my engagement high? Do people love to be disrespected?
You're talking about what ought to be, as if it were how it is. It's not that way. It's how I describe. Maybe it should be some other way, but it's not.
> My line of thinking is what makes companies profitable.
I don't disagree, however unfortunate that is.
> You can moralize all you want, but the incentives align for a company to maximize on profitability, not on "hey my customers like me".
Let's change that so that the incentives do work for being liked.
> You can't pay for dinner with goodwill, but you can pay for dinner with money.
Somewhere there's some middle ground which represents the failure of our government to incentivize; where companies may still be profitable (even obscenely so), and employees are able to pay for dinner, and customers are happy, and people aren't being manipulated.
> If I'm being so disrespectful, why is my engagement high? Do people love to be disrespected?
Love to be? No. Most have become desensitized to disrespect such that they expect to be abused by collusion between big corporations and big government.
> You're talking about what ought to be, as if it were how it is. It's not that way. It's how I describe. Maybe it should be some other way, but it's not.
I'm talking about what ought to be, indeed. I recognize it's not that way. Do you recognize that it doesn't have to be that way? Don't you agree that it should be some other way?
> If I'm being so disrespectful, why is my engagement high? Do people love to be disrespected?
There is a large difference between what people "want" (at a given moment) and "like." It's very much possible — and I'm pretty sure you're currently advocating it — to make people "want" things they don't actually like. Yeah, it's a weird glitch in our brains.
Also, you are making a very good case for destroying capitalism, so that's good.
And that's all that's wrong with engagement in a nutshell. You prioritize your needs over the user's needs. It's not about trailing or leading indicators, it's about not burning down the rest of the world just to benefit yourself.
"I may not give a crap how 'happy' you are if you're still engaging" - you've really put it succinctly. That's the mentality of a drug pusher.
You're missing one critical point -- lack of engagement means you can't iterate with the customer. No engagement means you can't improve, and you can't make your customer happier.
Nothing happens without engagement. You can survive an unhappy customer as long as they're still around, even if they're only providing feedback and aren't likely to buy again.
You can't survive nobody coming into your shop in the first place.
> You're missing one critical point -- lack of engagement means you can't iterate with the customer. No engagement means you can't improve, and you can't make your customer happier.
You can iterate with the customer without being abusive or invasive about it. Show exactly what's being tracked and provide mechanisms for the person to decline its use. Recognize that the customer is valuable; compensate them for their time if you're tracking what they do or answering questions about their experiences.
> You can't survive nobody coming into your shop in the first place.
Even untracked customers can continue on to purchase goods and services. If you can't build a business site which is capable of basic business operation then perhaps you should hire competent web developers and/or a good marketing team; or perhaps your business wasn't so needed after all.
If someone badmouths the product, they aren't satisfied. And even if they're engaged with it, odds are high they're looking for something better.
Besides, the only reason engagement became a thing is because the way people are paid is based on ad revenue instead of actual payment by the person using the product. Satisfaction is king when the user and the customer are the same person. Just ask any insurance company (for example).
Whatever happened to user studies? If you want to find out why your product sucks, pay your target audience to use it! I bought a laptop from Gigabyte a little while back that they wanted feedback on, so they offered a $30 woolies card for filling out a form.
That's a little bit of a Catch-22. "Engagement" is not a well-defined metric, and in practice when people try to measure it, they end up justifying the use of any number they happen to be able to measure at the moment. So almost any number can plausibly be called an "engagement score" or something similarly vague.
Your goal should be for something more specific, and ideally at least a tad more concrete. Things like "product satisfaction," "positive impression of brand," and "purchase intent" could all be synonyms for "engagement" but they are not synonyms with each other because they are all more specific and narrowly-defined. And furthermore, they're better guidelines because particular features or activities could be well-suited for one and not another, so optimizing towards one of those actually provides some focus.
What are some alternatives that are not a synonym for engagement?