Myth Busters: The Dark Side of High Email interaction

We've all been there. We see a high interaction metric that looks great on paper, and we immediately start patting ourselves on the back. "Wow, our customers are really engaged with us!" But is that always the case?

Unfortunately, not always. Sometimes, high email interaction can actually be a bad thing.

Why? Because it can be a sign that your customers are constantly being bombarded with emails and they're just trying to keep up. In other words, they're interacting out of necessity, not because they actually want to.

Interaction without understanding customer segments, the impact of communication channels, and cyclicity of interaction can be labeled as Vanity metrics. Can make the overall metrics on our dashboard look great but provide no real value to the outcome.

Figure 1

A study conducted by involve.ai showed that the average interaction with churned customers was almost twice as much as the interaction with an active customer (Figure 1). The study also found that, on average, a customer who is about to churn will have more than three times as many interactions in the month prior to churning as they did in a typical month (Figure 2)

Figure 2

This forced a need to implement a ceiling for interactions in conjunction with the lifecycle stage of the customer beyond which the customer would be considered at risk.

There's a big lesson here for all of us: don't get too caught up in vanity metrics. Yes, they might look good on paper, but they don't always tell the whole story. Sometimes, it's necessary to dig a little deeper to really understand what's going on with your customers.