Customer Engagement vs Customer Experience: Driving Real Results in 2025

What if the real power in SaaS growth isn’t about choosing between customer engagement and customer experience, but rather using both in sync?

From the outside, it might seem like these two things are on opposite sides of the spectrum, but in reality, one fuels the other. A great experience often leads to increased engagement, which in turn offers more chances to craft better experiences. When you ignore one, you weaken the other. 

This guide offers a helpful look at what engagement vs experience is. We’ll also look at how to improve both, and where you can use each one to improve the other. 

What is the difference between customer engagement and customer experience?

Customer engagement is about interaction. It is, essentially, the ongoing dialogue - every click, comment, and reply - between your brand and the customer.  This is an easy metric to measure, looking at the frequency of logins, email open rates, and product usage.

Customer experience, on the other hand, is the lasting impression that remains after those interactions. It’s shaped by how intuitive your UX is, how your support team resolves issues, and how well new users feel heard and helped during onboarding. 

In simple terms, engagement is what they do, and experience is how they feel. 

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How to boost customer engagement and increase loyalty

Driving loyalty in SaaS starts with consistent, thoughtful engagement. Here are a few proven tactics that go beyond surface-level advice to help you forge real connections with your users. 

Prioritize real-time communication

Attention spans are getting shorter, and patience is wearing thinner across most customers. They’re used to instant gratification, from same-day delivery to auto-generated meeting notes. And those same customers are expecting support to match the pace. 

The best way to meet this expectation is to use a VoIP phone system. This gives you a direct line of communication with your customers. Plus, when you integrate it into your CRM, this system enables click-to-call features, logs every interaction, and routes calls to the right person every time.  

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You can also add chatbots for off-hours support and Slack integrations for instant team collaboration. Then there’s the beauty of in-app messaging that lets you guide users in real time, offer nudges during setup, and respond instantly. 

Engage customers across multiple channels

Speaking of meeting them where they are, it’s important to remember that your customers aren’t all hanging out in one place, and your brand shouldn’t either.

Outside of real-time communication, consider where you can best interact with users. Email, live chat, and even social media all have their own place in the communication chain. 

The goal should be to integrate a multichannel support strategy into your product and onboarding flows. Use tools that unify those conversations into a single dashboard by adopting a shared inbox or using an enterprise helpdesk. This way, your support will be fast, but it will also feel more personal and familiar.

Use data to personalize each customer’s journey

When engagement is the goal, personalization is a kind of cheat code. You don’t just send off emails, you offer pieces of information and stories that speak to a user’s role, feature usage, or lifecycle stage.

Start with your product data. Look at how users interact with your platform, what features they use, where they click, and when they drop off. Use that data to trigger tailored in-app messages, onboarding content, and email campaigns.

Early-stage user? Offer a webinar tailored to their goals. Power user? Nudge them toward an advanced feature they haven’t touched. Running a limited-time beta? Invite your most curious users to try it first.

Improving customer experience for long-term relationships

Creating a meaningful experience for your customers means making them feel understood. Here are ways to ensure you’re doing just that. 

Make content accessible for a global audience

A great user experience for one might not be the same for another. You can't please everyone, but you can remove barriers that keep users from feeling included. One of the most important ways to do that? Speak their language, literally.

Whether you’re putting out a webinar, product explainer video, or marketing content, you want users around the world to be able to understand it. This will broaden your reach, but also make your audience feel valued and understood. 

Having an online video translation service tool in your arsenal is an excellent way to make this happen. With these tools, you can subtitle and translate your video content into 100+ languages, quickly and accurately. You then put out a localized experience that shows you respect your audience’s language and culture. 

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Build responsive apps and websites

There’s no escaping the fact that most users are accessing your site on their mobile devices. Even in SaaS, it’s increasingly common for users to check dashboards, respond to notifications, or access support from their phones. 

If your product isn’t built with mobile in mind, you’re losing ground. The idea is to have a responsive design that suits mobile as well as all other devices that your user might be switching between. 

This means that no matter how or where your customers interact with your product, it’s a seamless experience. Your buttons are all tappable. The layouts adapt. All of the text is readable. 

When your focus is on functionality, accessibility, and meeting your users where they are, you’re much more likely to deliver the kind of experience that will be remembered. And that is how you improve customer retention in SaaS.

Collect and act on customer feedback

If you’re only asking for feedback to check a box, your customers can feel that. 

It’s what a lot of teams do. Send out a quarterly NPS survey or bury a feedback form in the footer, and then ignore the results that come in. But your users aren’t clueless, and when nothing changes, they’re going to stop responding. 

The feedback sent to you is a strong tool. And the process should be treated like a product input, not a vanity metric. Add it into the customer journey with short, contextual questions. 

Think about:

• One-minute polls after onboarding
• Two-click ratings after support chats
• Open text boxes for feedback if a customer cancels

And once you have the answers, don’t just toss them into the void. Use them. Let users know what changed thanks to them speaking up. Showing them these improvements will prove that you value their voices and increase their user experience overall. 

Integrating engagement and experience for maximum impact

Now we know how to maximize both engagement and experience, how do we combine the two to create a stronger, longer-lasting impact?

The goal here is to blend the two so well that they become almost indistinguishable in the user's mind, without losing sight of their roles individually, of course. When done right, this integration builds deeper trust, sharper insights, and more loyal customers. 

Making compliance part of the experience

When someone lands on your product page or signs up for your email list, what’s the very first impression they get? If it’s a wall of confusing legal language or a forced ‘consent’ form they can’t skip, you’re not off to a great start. 

No one wants to feel tricked or tracked when all they wanted was to find a reliable SaaS solution. 

But as a provider, it’s important to know that marketing compliance doesn’t have to be a legal speed bump. It’s there to help you earn trust and keep everyone protected.

So flip the script. Turn consent into a moment of clarity, not confusion.

• Use straightforward language.
• Tell people exactly what information you’re collecting and why.
• Give them control — and make sure those controls aren’t buried five clicks deep.

When users feel like they’re in control, they relax. They trust you more. And trusted users stick around. They engage. They open your emails, explore your product, and respond when you ask for feedback.

Use automation to scale real human experiences

We all know that automation can have a reputation for feeling cold and impersonal. You don’t want to blast generic messages on a timer to your customers. But you can get automation to work for you if you blend it into the experience without breaking the human connection.

Here’s how:

• Use context-aware triggers: Don’t rely on guesswork. Send nudges based on real user actions. If someone’s stuck, help them. If they’ve hit a milestone, celebrate it.
• Go beyond “Hi, [First Name]”: Personalization means knowing what they care about, where they are in their journey, and what they haven’t explored yet. Use that.
• Always offer a human fallback: If a bot can’t solve the problem, get out of the way. Let users talk to a real person — quickly.
• Automate the boring, not the personal: Use automation to handle the repetitive stuff: confirmations, reminders, follow-ups. But when it comes to critical touchpoints, like onboarding, issue resolution, or churn risks, lean in with human effort. 
• Measure impact, not just output: It’s easy to track how many messages went out. What’s harder is measuring whether users felt supported, guided, or frustrated. Use surveys and heatmaps, as well as user feedback, to close the loop and fine-tune your flows.

You just have to stop treating automation like a megaphone and start using it like a conversation. When automation supports the user instead of overwhelming them, it fades into the background. And then you get to deliver a product that feels responsive, intelligent, and helpful. Without burning out your human team. 

Sync your teams and your data

If your teams aren’t talking to each other, your customers are going to feel it. They might get hit with an onboarding message twice or a discount offer they’ve already used. But the worst would be them reaching out to support and having to repeat the issue to three or four different people. 

When you’re blending engagement and experience, and trying to level up both, you need information. If that information is stuck in different tools, different teams, or different Slack threads, the customer is the one paying for it.

Here’s how you clean up and ensure you have a synced communication flow:

• Use a shared CRM or CDP. This should pull together all the useful stuff. It needs to have what people are clicking on, which features they’re using, and any feedback they’ve sent in. Your whole team should be able to access this information in one place. 

• Map the customer journey together. Go beyond “they signed up, then they upgraded.” Dig deeper. Where did your customers get stuck? Even if it was briefly. Where are users dropping off? Where could a nudge or a message make things smoother? Get product, support, and marketing in the same room to figure it out.

• Make cross-team syncs a regular thing. Status updates are important, but you need more if you’re going to set a new standard. Set up real check-ins that look at actual customer behavior. From there, have the team figure out what’s working and what’s not. When Support hears what Marketing is planning, and Marketing knows what features Product is rolling out”, everything starts to click.

If your internal setup is messy, it’s noticeable - even when you think it isn’t. An in-sync team makes for a smarter product, smoother support, and better customer communication. 

How to check if you’re blending these well

Here’s a quick checklist to see if you’re aligning engagement with experience at key moments in the customer journey:

Onboarding: 

• Are your welcome emails coordinated with in-product walkthroughs?
• Does your help content answer real, early-stage questions users are actually asking?

Support: 

• Can users switch from chatbot to human without starting over?
• Is support data feeding into marketing, so you’re not promoting features users struggle with?

Feature launches: 

• Are product announcements tied to usage nudges or in-app tooltips?
• Is feedback from early adopters informing follow-up messaging?

Churn points: 

• Are you identifying when engagement drops and intervening in time?
• Do exit surveys feed back into your UX and lifecycle campaigns?

Bridging the gap between engagement and experience for customer success

If you think about it, was it ever really a case of customer engagement vs customer experience? Sure, Marketing might have an upper hand in engagement, and Support may be the leader when it comes to experience. But at the end of the day, that’s still one customer being measured in both metrics. 

Customers don’t split their perception of your brand into neat little buckets. They just know how your product feels to use, and whether they want to interact with it. That’s why to compete in the SaaS game, it’s not about choosing one side. 

It’s about blending both so tightly that they reinforce each other. Because when users have great experiences, they engage more. And the more they engage, the better you can shape their experience.