6 Levels of Customer Engagement and Where Your Brand Really Stands
Written by Tom Peace, CEO & Founder of Sway Outcomes
Tom Peace is the CEO and founder of Sway Outcomes, a global customer engagement consultancy, and the former leader of The Loyalty People. He has advised brands including Sally Beauty, Wingstop, Vans, The North Face and Saudi German Health.
Most brands can tell you how many loyalty members they have. Far fewer can tell you how strong those customer relationships really are. Here's a simple framework to see where you stand today, where the gaps are, and what to fix first.
What is customer engagement maturity?
Ask a leadership team how good their customer engagement is, and you'll usually get one of two answers. The first is a number: members, open rates, app downloads. The second is a project: "We're launching a new loyalty programme next year." Neither tells you where the brand actually stands.
Membership on its own proves very little. In 2023, consumers in the United States belonged to an average of 17.9 loyalty programmes, yet only about half of those memberships were active, according to EMARKETER's analysis of Bond loyalty data. Signing up is easy. Genuine engagement is not.
Customer engagement maturity is a measure of how well a brand turns those signups into real relationships. It covers everything from the marketing basics through to data, customer relationship management (CRM), loyalty and artificial intelligence (AI). Without a clear view of your starting point, it's very easy to buy the wrong technology, or the right technology too early.
That's why we built a maturity model with six levels at Sway Outcomes. It's a simple way to see where a brand is today, where the gaps are, and what to do next. You can use it on your own business in about an hour.
Want us to do it for you? Email me at tomimageswayoutcomes.com, and we'll run a free Customer Engagement Accelerator (CEA) report on your brand.
The 6 levels explained
Each level builds on the one below it. Think of it as a staircase, not a menu.
Marketing foundations: The basics, done well. This means a clear marketing mix, a real understanding of who your customers are, an honest audit of your channels and customer experience, and a view of what competitors are doing. It also covers whether your marketing technology is fit for purpose. You're here if you're still answering questions like "Who actually buys from us, and why?"
Brand visibility: Being seen and being recognised. This covers your media and channel mix, a consistent tone of voice, and clear brand and product benefits. Influencer seeding often sits here too. You're here if people know your name but couldn't tell you what makes you different.
Deeper engagement: This is where the relationship starts to form. It involves a connected journey across channels, the data infrastructure to understand it, social proof from real customers, and a credible position on sustainability and social responsibility. You're here if customers like you, but you still treat every visit as a fresh start.
Conversion and action: Now you're using what you know to change behaviour. This means CRM that drives action rather than just sending newsletters, gamification, proper data capture, retail media, and a reward and incentive framework that's designed, not inherited. You're here if you can target the right offer to the right customer and measure whether it worked.
Loyalty and advocacy: The customer chooses you and tells others. This level covers lifetime value, a genuine loyalty strategy, subscriptions, community, and customers creating content with and for you. You're here if your best customers would recommend you without being asked, and you know exactly who they are. For a closer look at why this level pays off, read how customer experience translates into revenue.
Retention and reengagement: The frontier. This includes generative AI, real-time predictive analytics, conversational marketing, hyperpersonalisation, and agentic solutions. The aim is to spot a customer drifting before they've gone and win them back in a way that feels personal rather than automated. Very few brands are genuinely here. Plenty think they are.
Where brands go wrong
We use this model across sectors, from retail and hospitality to healthcare. The same three patterns come up every time.
Skipping levels. A brand launches a points programme (Level 4) or an AI chatbot (Level 6) before it has a single view of the customer (Level 3). The new tool works fine. It just has nothing useful to work with.
Investing where it's exciting, not where it's weak. The visible layers get the budget: the app, the rewards, the launch campaign. The foundations underneath stay patchy. It's like fitting a new kitchen in a house with a leaky roof.
Scoring the roadmap, not reality. "We're rolling out personalisation next quarter" is not personalisation. Maturity is what customers can experience today. Everything else is a plan.
None of these are signs of a bad team. They're what happens when every function is doing its job, but nobody owns the whole picture. I explore this further in my interview on why customers stay and what brands often get wrong.
How to score your brand
You don't need a consultant to get started. Get three or four people from marketing, CRM, digital and customer service in a room, and work through each level together.
Score each level out of 100%, based on what a customer can actually see and use today.
Benchmark against the best, not your nearest rival. A great coffee shop app can teach a bank a lot.
Be tougher on Levels 5 and 6. These are the hardest to get right and the easiest to overrate.
Look for the gap, not the average. A brand scoring 80% at Level 4 but 40% at Level 3 has a foundation problem, whatever the overall number says.
The disagreements in the room are often more useful than the scores. If marketing rates you at 70% and customer service rates you at 30%, that gap is your first finding.
Most brands land somewhere around Level 3 or 4, with a few strong pockets higher up. That's normal. It's also good news, because it means the next step is usually clear. Fix the weakest level beneath you before reaching for the one above.
Frequently asked questions
What is a customer engagement maturity model? It's a framework that scores how well a brand builds relationships with its customers, from basic marketing through to retention driven by AI. It shows where you are today and the order in which to improve.
Is customer engagement the same as loyalty? No. A loyalty programme is one tool within customer engagement. Engagement covers the whole relationship, including data, communication, experience and service. Loyalty is the outcome when all of that works together.
Can a business skip a level? You can buy the technology for any level. But without the foundations underneath, it rarely delivers. That's why the model works as a staircase, not a menu.
Find out where you stand
The brands that win aren't the ones with the most technology. They're the ones that know exactly where they stand and climb one step at a time.
If you'd like an outside view, my team at Sway Outcomes runs a free Customer Engagement Accelerator (CEA). We score your brand across all six levels and send you a short report showing where you sit, where the gaps are and your quickest wins. To get your free CEA report, email me at tom@swayoutcomes.com or message me on LinkedIn.
Read more from Tom Peace
Tom Peace, CEO & Founder of Sway Outcomes
Tom Peace is a customer engagement strategist who helps brands turn transactions into lasting relationships. Under his leadership, The Loyalty People became a globally recognised brand within the loyalty industry, with a rapidly growing and highly engaged following. He went on to found Sway Outcomes, a consultancy that goes beyond loyalty programme strategy to cover every aspect of customer engagement. Its maturity model has six levels and shows brands exactly where they stand and what to do next. By combining deep sector expertise with diagnostics enabled by artificial intelligence (AI), Tom delivers strategic clarity in weeks rather than months for brands such as Sally Beauty, Wingstop, Vans, The North Face and Saudi German Health.
