Measure Customer Engagement for SaaS Apps

One of the many things Salesforce.com does well is generate a monthly customer engagement email that gets emailed to account administrators. In the email, there’s a separate line for each of the major functions of the application as well as how many times it was used by the account in the last month, or if it hasn’t been used yet. Salesforce.com has automated part of the account management process, but more importantly, helped customers get more value from the software.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), since it’s delivered over the web, can have end-user interaction measured using standard web analytics tools like Google Analytics. Like with any application, it’s easy to measure which users use which features. SaaS providers should measure customer engagement in their app.

Here are some potential customer engagement categories to measure:

• Value generated by the application (e.g. return on investment)
• Number of user logins, as well as logins by type of role
• Modules used, frequency of usage, and importance of modules (e.g. the more important modules are weighted more heavily)
• API calls, if applicable, which measure the activity of third-party integrations with the SaaS app

SaaS providers should measure customer engagement for their apps and incorporate it into their processes.

What else? What other customer engagement categories should be measured?