Measuring the success of a business program can be challenging and requires an understanding of goals and metrics. Let’s look at 15 crucial Customer Success Metrics that may help determine your business’s success in Customer Support.
What Are Customer Success Metrics?
Customer Success metrics are essential to any company’s strategy for maximizing lifetime value and customer loyalty. These numbers can show if your customers are happy with their purchases and how well they’re adopting new products, which will result in higher lifetime values for you.
They provide valuable insights into critical areas like churn rates, adoption rates, or product satisfaction that can help you make better business decisions about improving your products/services to attract more clients who will be satisfied long-term.
Why are Customer Success Metrics important?
Customer Success metrics keep your business on track
Monitoring the right metrics can help keep your business on track and ensure you get a good read about where it’s going. Metrics are important for keeping an eye out for any potential problems before they arise, like customer churn or lost revenue from not meeting goals set forth by management.
Customer Success metrics help improve your product
Using data from users, you can find out what they think about your product. This knowledge will allow the engineering team to improve their work and make more informed decisions on future projects.
Customer success metrics is an essential tool in measuring success for any company or startup because it helps identify where changes need to be made based on user behavior, often resulting in ingested feedback that could lead designers down new paths of inspiration.
Metrics act as a warning sign
They let you know when customers are tired of your product and might be looking for something new to try out instead. You’ll have ample warning and be able to intervene before things get too bad with proper metrics.
Measuring metrics can help bring customers more value
Measuring metrics is one of the most important things you can do as a company. Carefully tracking customer sentiment will help guide product development away from pain points and towards value-added features, which increases customers’ satisfaction level even more, so they’ll be sure to come back for seconds.
How Do You Measure Customer Success?
In-app behavior tracking
In-app behavior tracking lets you watch what customers do in real-time and get statistics that indicate their sticking points and how friendly the app or interface is. This can be helpful for both your customer success team to see which features are most popular with users, so they know where best to focus efforts on improving those areas of need.
CRM platforms
CRM platforms will be a great place to get your customer data. This is where most of their account information will end up, and many CRMs can assemble basic reports or export it all in one handy file, so there’s no need to go hunting around every day looking for what needs to be done next.
Customer Success Platforms
Customer Success Platforms are an excellent way to gather and analyze data. CSMs can input new customer information as conversations happen, ensuring up-to-date reports that will give you the competitive edge in your industry. CSPs often integrate with CRM databases but can also generate value-rich dashboards for any type or company looking at all aspects of client satisfaction, from marketing analytics to financial planning capabilities.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey
Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys are an excellent way to check how customers feel about your company. This type of measurement takes a snapshot in time and does not provide insight into their overall thoughts or opinions, but it can tell you what people are thinking based on past interactions with them over the last 30 days.
The feedback form
The feedback form is a way to get in-depth people’s thoughts on the product. You can turn ratings into graphs that show how satisfied customers are with your company while using write-ins for more specific responses and themes throughout their experience.
The difference between metrics and KPIs
The metrics and KPIs we use in business today are often interchangeable, but they have very different purposes. While both rely on data to some degree, each unique function distinguishes it from the other.
Metrics are important in measuring the success or failure of an organization’s activities. It provides data on how well they do with specific tasks, like customer retention rates.
In a Customer Success environment, there is more than just financial metrics-type information collected about your customers that can help you optimize their experience throughout different relationships/churn periods, etc.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are valuable for improving team performance. KPIs provide data on how your group is performing and can be used to track progress or make adjustments in training programs so that you achieve better results over time.
Top 15 Customer Success Metrics
Customer Churn Rate
Customer Churn Rate is one way to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty. The higher it goes, the more customers leave their service with an unhappy feeling about their product or company’s effectiveness in improving your business’s ability to keep them around long term.
To calculate the churn rate, follow these steps:
- First, determine the timeframe that you’ll consider when measuring your data. This can be a week, month, quarter, year, etc.
- Next, determine how many existing customers there were at the start of this time period as well as the number of customers that churned during the same timeframe.
- Finally, divide the number of churned customers by the total number of existing customers to find your churn rate.
Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) is a great way to see how much your customer base has grown since working with your business. This metric outlines the amount of money they spend on products and services each month. It can be helpful for SaaS companies who operate as subscriptions because it shows whether or not those customers are successful in their use.
Expansion MRR is an excellent metric for measuring your company’s expansion into new markets. It shows you the amount of additional revenue generated by customers outside their monthly subscription, which can give a good idea about how effective upgrades or customer loyalty programs are at targeting non-subscribers with content offerings that interest them specifically.
To calculate monthly recurring revenue, multiply your total number of customers by their average cost. This will give you an idea about how much money is being made each month for that specific business or organization.
To calculate expansion MRR, you need to add up all revenue that was generated from non-recurring purchases. These would include things like upsells and cross-sells and loyalty programs purchased occasionally instead of monthly subscriptions or one-time payments for access services.
By adding these values together, you see how successfully your company captures customers’ attention. If this number increases over time, then it can be assumed that more people are enjoying what they offer and would like to continue spending money with them for their success to remain and grow even further.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Customer satisfaction is determined by measuring contentment among all parties involved in the exchange – especially you! The higher this number goes up, the more likely people will make repeat purchases, which means greater profits for businesses like yours too.
Net Promoter Score is a popular measure of customer satisfaction because they rely heavily on how likely you would recommend someone else’s company. The more positive feedback loop between your customers and employees will make them want to share their experiences with others, which can lead to even further growth for both parties involved.
Your business can use an NPS to get customers’ feedback on their experience with your company. The questionnaire asks participants to rate their satisfaction levels and provide reasoning behind those scores, so you know if any problems or trends emerge.
To calculate NPS, you need to conduct an NPS survey asking customers one question: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product or service?” Once the participants provide their answers, you need to group them as customers that give a score of:
- 0-6 are classified as detractors.
- 7-8 are grouped as passives.
- 9-10 falls under the name of promoters.
After the survey scores are grouped, you can calculate the NPS. The NPS calculation is done by subtracting the percentage of promoters from the percentage of detractors. The result gives your business’s Net Promoter Score.
Customer Health Score
Customer Health Score measures how likely your customers are to grow, renew flat or churn. There is no one-size fits all approach when it comes to assessing customer success, and that varies company by company. Still, there can often be some critical learnings from analyzing these metrics, such as knowing which accounts do not do well with service provisioning before over servicing those clients since they’re more prone to leaving.
The customer health score is a great way for companies to identify the risks before they arise and unhappy customers. This will help minimize churn rates, which means higher profits for your company.
To measure customer success, you can develop a health score. What do your business’s finances look like? How many customers do they have, and how has that changed over time? Get an understanding of their financials as it pertains to the product being sold or service provided by looking at factors such as age-level or income brackets to identify trends so far ahead of where we would expect them based on current numbers.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
Customer Satisfaction Score, or CSAT for short, is similar to NPS, but it does have one significant difference. Instead of asking participants about their likelihood of recommending the brand in question, businesses get a snapshot when asked if they’ve had any successful interactions with customer support teams during transactions.
Customer Satisfaction Score can be measured by asking how satisfied they were with their most recent experience. This metric should analyze the amount of joy someone had from a single interaction and not consider whether or not this person would recommend us as an overall brand.
- Step 1: Once you have your form set up, you can calculate CSAT by dividing the number of positive scores (scores six to 10) by the total number of scores you captured.
- Step 2: Then, if you multiply your result by 100, you’ll have the percentage of customers who are happy with their brand experience.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Customer Lifetime Value is a crucial measure for any company to track. It’s the total profit you can expect from one customer throughout their entire relationship with your business. It should be tracked because different strategies will need this number at varying degrees depending on what kind of marketing campaign or offer they’re running to attract new customers while retaining current ones.
Customer Lifetime Value is a metric that shows:
- How much a customer is worth to your brand and their value
- How much money should you be investing in customer retention
- An insight into whether or not a customer is likely to become a repeat customer
- Assessing CLV is crucial to investing in the right customers and is more likely to bring value to your brand.
You can calculate your Customer Lifetime Value by taking the average purchase amount and multiplying it with how often customers make purchases. Then, multiply the outcome value by your average customer lifespan. By doing this, you’ll get an estimate of what one individual’s contribution will be towards helping grow revenue for years to come.
Customer Retention Cost (CRC)
Customer Retention Cost is the most fundamental measure of customer success. The higher your business’ CRC, means they’re able to retain more customers and therefore increase profits even if it comes at a lower rate than acquiring new clients each month (which many businesses do).
Loyal customers are the lifeblood of any business and financial stability. By measuring your customer retention rate, you can make intelligent moves on how much to spend for marketing to keep these valuable clients happy with them around longer.
To determine how much it will cost to retain customers, look at all of your Customer Success efforts’ expenses, including the costs spent on payroll for customer success and customer service teams, engagement and adoption programs, professional services and training, and customer marketing.
Add these expenses into a sum and divide that value by your total number of customers. The result will give you your business’s customer retention cost.
Qualitative Customer Feedback
With Qualitative Customer feedback, you can answer critical questions about why customers provided negative or positive responses to your service. It’s vital for marketers who want a deeper understanding of their products and services so that they may continue providing top-notch quality every time.
Qualitative Customer feedback can be collected using open-ended questions from a surveyor. This way, your customers can explain why they have given you specific scores and how it applies to their experience with the company or product at hand. Once qualitative data has been analyzed through text analytics techniques like latent analysis, survey responses will give insights into what is most important about an item based on different levels of satisfaction measurements.
First Contact Resolution Rate (FCR)
First Contact Resolution Rate (FCR) is a metric used to see whether your customer support inquiries can be resolved on their first contact.
Although this might seem more closely related to service quality than success rates, FCR plays a vital role in both because improved loyalty will result from better resolution time and shorter average visit duration. It also helps identify if any hindrances could prevent people from finding what they need quickly when contacting us – which would decrease satisfaction levels even further.
You want to ensure that your customer support team can reach as many customers as possible quickly and efficiently with a high-resolution rate. The questions that need to be asked at this point are:
- What defines a first contact resolution?
- Is my support team established enough to resolve issues on first contact?
- If a customer got in contact with another department or person from the company, does that count as first contact?
- Do calls that were ended due to wait time count?
- And other questions, depending on your workspace and company structure.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
Customer Effort Score (CES) is an innovative way of measuring how difficult it was for customers to perform specific actions with your product or company. This lets you, as a business owner/CEO, know what areas need improvement to attract more clients and increase their satisfaction level with every interaction they have had thus far.
While this metric seems reliable, business experts recommend using it with an external survey for more objective answers and results.
To measure customer effort, you can conduct a survey and divide the sum of positive responses by the total number.
Renewal Rate
Your success determines how many people sign up and use your product. If you’re a SaaS business, this may be one of the most important metrics for measuring customer success because subscriptions are standard in these businesses.
If your renewal rate is high, your team or product is succeeding in driving customer success. So much so that customers are willing to commit further time and energy toward their experience with you because of how beneficial it has been for them thus far.
The renewal rate can be calculated:
- Step 1: Divide the number of customers who renewed their subscription by the number of users who were up for renewal.
- Step 2: Multiply your result by 100 to determine your renewal rate.
Product Usage Rate
Your product will be more valuable to customers if they use it frequently.
Customers with SaaS products always want to know how often they can use them. Customer Service teams can keep track of this usage rate for each user, which helps ensure that everyone’s getting the most out of their subscription or purchase.
To calculate this metric, you need to decide which intervals of time (daily/weekly) and percentage your customers achieve.
Free Trial Conversion Rate
The free trial conversion rate is a crucial measure to determine the success of any freemium option. This metric reveals how well customers are switching from their complimentary version of your product, which may have limited features or functionality but still drives rapid user adoption in order for them to survive and thrive.
You can measure your free trial conversion rate by dividing the number of customers using the free trial by the number of customers who converted to a paid subscription. The data point should be looked at monthly, quarterly or annual, depending upon what best suits you.
Active Users
Companies focused on growth often measure customer success metrics such as active users. This can be done by adding the number of customers who use a particular product at least once daily, weekly, or monthly. Surveys may also capture this information to understand how people feel about your service before investing more time.
Average Time on Platform/ Application
The more time your customers spend with the software means you provide a valuable service. Understanding this metric can help improve customer satisfaction and set benchmarks for how long they should be using it to make improvements over time, leading them down an even better path of success.
Measuring customer success requires a variety of metrics. Some focus on your customers, while others measure how they interact with the company. Still, it’s important to remember that every metric should always have one primary goal: increasing your revenue!
Don’t lose sight or forget about this when establishing and monitoring customer success metrics – make sure their needs come first so we can all grow together.
