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Measuring Customer Success is the best way to figure out how well your users understand the full value of your product.
Are they using every facet of your product possible, and are they happy with the way it works? Are they underutilizing key areas of your product or unaware of certain functionality?
Or are they just straight up unsatisfied with the results they’ve seen from using your product?
These insights can give you invaluable information on how successful and satisfied your users are with your product, which can help guide your roadmap going forward and prevent future churn.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: there are literally countless ways to track and measure Customer Success. How are you supposed to know which is the best for your particular business?
Well, it’s your lucky day. We reached out to over fifty leading experts in the tech industry to ask them how they track Customer Success and compiled all their answers here, just for you.
Don’t have time to read through fifty responses?
We get it. After parsing through everything they had to say, we put together a quick-hit list of the top 15 Customer Success metrics that our experts used and broke down each one for you.
We’ll define each metric, explain why it’s important to track, and show you how to calculate it to make it as easy as possible for you to track user engagement.
Here’s what our experts ranked as the top fifteen Customer Success metrics, how to measure them, and why they’re important.
Want something even more in depth? You can take a look through their entire responses below.
One of the simplest and most straightforward ways to measure customer satisfaction is by collecting Net Promoter Score, or NPS.
Essentially, NPS asks your users to rate on a scale from 1-10 how likely they are to recommend your product to someone else.
Typically, those who rated 1-6 are considered “Detractors”, those who rated 7-8 are considered “Neutrals”, and those who rated 9-10 are considered “Promoters."
You can then find your NPS score by subtracting the percentage of “Detractors” from the percentage of “Promoters.”
% Promoters – % Detractors = NPS
So for example, if you have 74% “Promoters” and 12% “Detractors”, then you have an NPS score of 62.
NPS can be super helpful in measuring Customer Success because it provides an insight into how satisfied your users are and how much value they’re deriving from your product.
The main drawback with NPS, however, is that it’s really only a numerical value and you don’t always fully understand why a user would give you a low NPS score.
Another simple metric to track Customer Success is measuring the amount of activity that your customers are doing within your product.
Tracking Daily Active Users (DAU) or Monthly Active Users (MAU) can show you how many unique users are actively using your product during a particular interval.
When calculating user activity, it’s important to determine what your team defines as an “active” user.
Is it when they log in to your product? Is it when they click on a specific attribute or open a specific page?
Once your team has defined what an active user is for your specific product, then you can find how many daily, weekly, or monthly users you have.
If your DAU or MAU metrics are steadily growing, then there’s a good chance users are satisfied with your product, but if they’re stagnant or dropping, it may be time to take a look at your product to find the reason why.
Tracking the number of customer referrals you have is a simple yet insightful way to measure Customer Success.
Referrals are important for a myriad of reasons, but most importantly, people are much more likely to purchase a product if someone they know and trust is the one selling it to them. Plus, it’s a more concrete statistic to look at than, say, NPS.
While still insightful, NPS relies on the abstract question of would you recommend this product to a person, while number of referrals shows the actual number of people who were not only recommended this product, but were interested enough to go through with the purchase.
Healthy referral numbers often indicate a healthy and successful customer base.
It may also be more impactful to track the percentage of referrals based on your entire user population, particularly if you have a smaller overall user base.
For example, saying you’ve only had twenty customer referrals may not give you much context, but saying you have a 20% referral rate will give you a better indication of how satisfied your general user population is with your product.
It may seem rather obvious, but one of the best ways to find out if your users are successful within your product is to just ask them about their experience.
What have they liked about your product so far, and what do they think could’ve been easier to do? What functionality do they feel is missing? What has been the most confusing aspect of your product?
Not only will this give you great insight into what’s working and what isn’t, it gives a voice to the customer and makes them feel loyal to your product because you’re listening to what they care about.
Data-driven people often try to steer away from qualitative customer feedback like this, but quantitative feedback tends to only give us one side of the picture: what did the customer like or not like.
Qualitative feedback gives us not only what the customer is feeling but also why they feel that way.
Conducting interviews and sending out surveys to a customer advisory board or to specifically build user segments can give you greater insight into what exactly is causing a customer to not be successful in your product so that you can make the experience that much better for them.
New customers are great to have, and increasing the top of your funnel with new users can be crucial to growing your business.
But if users are trying your product once and never coming back, then that means that they’re not seeing the value in your product or are not fully understanding it.
This can be a huge problem as it will increase your churn rate and can stunt your company’s growth.
Tracking your retention rate shows you how many users are getting value from your product versus those who aren’t.
Retention rate = # of customers at the end of a period - # of customers acquired during that period / # of customers at the beginning of the period.
Once you understand how many customers are returning to your product, you can reach out to those user segments who aren’t returning to find out what’s been causing friction.
From there, go ahead and create a Customer Success playbook with educational materials that your team can send when users start to exhibit signs of risk or low engagement.
It’s a great to proactively help those users better understand the value of your product and get them to come back.
If you offer both a free version and a paid version of your product, then tracking that conversion number can be a great indicator of Customer Success.
Measuring free-to-paid conversion is fairly straightforward; take the number of converted users and divide by your total user population.
Free-to-paid conversion = # of converted users / total user population
So, if you have 60 users who have converted from your free version to your paid version in the last month and you have 100 total users, then your conversion rate is 60%.
If you have a high conversion rate, then it’s obvious that your customers see the value of your product and feel they could be more successful with a paid subscription than whatever they’re getting for free.
If you have a low conversion, then there may be a couple things happening.
One, your free users are not seeing the full value of the product and it’s time to send them educational materials to help them understand everything you offer.
Or, it’s possible that you’re giving away too many great features in your free version and users don’t see the need to upgrade because they already have everything they need.
While this is exciting for the customer, it’s not a great way to stay in business; maybe consider removing some of your more advanced functionality from your free version or try showing the user that they could be doing even better by upgrading.
Your onboarding process is a huge factor in Customer Success and satisfaction. If a user has a very negative onboarding experience, they’re going to assume the rest of your product is designed just as poorly and probably aren’t going to stick around too long.
By investing some time and effort into designing a strong onboarding experience, using an onboarding playbook, and tracking engagement rates during onboarding, you can ensure that your customer isn’t confused or discouraged when getting set up with your product.
Is the customer clicking on all the tutorial links as they go through onboarding? Are they exploring all aspects of the product? Are they reaching out for additional support because they’re confused?
Tracking all of these metrics will help you perfect your onboarding experience and provide your users with all the tools they’ll need to be successful.
Expansion revenue is the percentage of your new revenue that is coming from your existing customers; that is, upselling.
Are they upgrading to a higher-tier plan? Are they paying for additional functionality? Do they want more seats to get more people on their team using your product?
Similar to tracking free-to-paid conversion rates, expansion revenue can give you insight into how much perceived value your product has to your existing customers and whether or not they’re willing to invest more money.
In order to calculate expansion revenue, you take the amount of new revenue from upsells during a specific time period and divide it by the amount of revenue you had during the previous time period.
If you’re tracking this number month to month, the equation would look like this:
Expansion revenue = Amount of upsell revenue / revenue from the previous month
So, if you ended June with $100,000 in revenue and you gained $10,000 in upsell revenue in July, your expansion revenue rate for July would be 10%.
Understanding why your existing customers will or won’t upgrade within your product can give you key understanding of how they view your product and can help you figure out how to reduce churn and increase revenue.
Time to First Value (TTFV), also known as Time to Value (TTV), is a commonly used Customer Success metric that helps you understand how successful and efficient your onboarding process is.
TTFV measures the amount of time between the close of the sale and when your customer completes onboarding.
Deciding when a customer officially finishes onboarding can be a bit difficult and will vary company to company, but it typically is the moment that your customer starts to derive actual value from your product and is no longer just learning how it works.
The shorter your TTFV, the more efficient your onboarding process is and the quicker that the customer starts to see actual value in your product.
Obviously, this is a metric that will likely change over time and is highly subjective based on what your company does.
If you have a more complicated product, then your TTFV is going to be much longer than a more simple product.
Something like TurboTax is inherently going to be more complicated to use than something like Tinder. But the customer is also likely expecting to gain more value out of TurboTax than Tinder, so it’s okay that their TTFV is longer.
As long as the perceived value matches the TTFV, your customers will be satisfied and successful.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) measures exactly what you’d expect it to; the total revenue you expect a single customer to generate over the course of their entire lifetime with your company.
CLV is one of the most fundamental Customer Success metrics that you can measure for your business.
Tracking CLV allows you to better understand if your customers are truly succeeding with your product.
If their CLV increases over their lifetime, then they’re deriving value from your product. If it’s decreasing, it may be time to take a look at your product and try to understand why customers are receiving less and less value from it over time.
CLV is calculated is calculated by taking your average purchase value and multiplying it by your average purchase frequency rate. Then, you’ll take that value and multiply it by by your average customer lifespan.
This will get you an estimated amount of revenue that any given customer will spend over their lifetime with your company.
CLV= (average purchase value x average purchase frequency rate) x average customer lifespan
So, if an average customer spends $100 a month, every month for 2 years, then your CLV would be ($100 x 1 purchase per month) x 24 months = $2,400.
The ultimate goal is to become so ingrained in a user’s workflow that they can’t imagine work without your product, so anywhere they go, they’ll bring you with them.
Tracking the number of support tickets created is a really simple yet useful way to gauge how well your customers are understanding your product.
If you push out a new feature and you have a sudden uptick in support tickets, then maybe something is wrong with the usability of the new feature or there’s something confusing about the new functionality.
You can also gain valuable insights by keeping track of support tickets being submitted by specific users or user segments and noting overall trends.
For example, if a lot of your users are submitting support tickets when they first start using your product then slowly decrease over time, it may be an indication that your onboarding experience could be improved.
Or if you’re only receiving support tickets for users who only use a certain aspect of your product, then maybe it’s time to take a more in-depth look at that particular part of your product for usability issues.
One of the biggest causes for churn is inadequate customer service. We all know how frustrating it can be to have a problem that needs to be resolved and you end up having to spend all day going back and forth with someone to try to address the issue.
This is why First Contact Resolution Rate is so important.
This metric tracks the percentage of customer service cases that are resolved within the first interaction.
If you have a high First Contact Resolution Rate (that means that the majority of your customer support requests are solved within the first interaction), then that means you’ve got a well-oiled machine.
Your customer support team is able to easily understand the issues your customers are having and can resolve them in an efficient manner.
If your First Contact Resolution Rate is lower, it may help to understand why it’s taking longer to resolve customer support issues.
Is your product more complicated, and so requires more steps to understand the issue and resolve it? Or is your current customer support system inefficient?
Identifying the problem can help lower your First Contact Resolution Rate and improve customer satisfaction.
Similar to First Contact Resolution Rate, it’s important to track how long the average customer support interaction takes.
If their issue isn’t being resolved within the first interaction, how long is it taking to resolve? What is the reason behind the length of resolution?
Studies have shown that 67% of churn can be avoided if a customer support issue is resolved within the first interaction, so understanding the average length of resolution and why it’s taking that long is crucial to keeping your customers satisfied and loyal.
A good indicator of whether or not your customers are successful in your product is if they’re coming back time and time again to continue using your product.
That’s where Net Customer Renewal Rate comes in.
This metric measures not only which customers are renewing their accounts, but also if they’re upgrading and starting to explore new features in your product.
The goal is to have a Net Renewal Rate that is over 100- meaning that your rate of expansion and renewal is higher than the rate of churn.
To calculate Net Renewal Rate, you take the value of renewals, add the value of expansion, and divide by the total value of contracts that were up for renewal.
Net Renewal Rate = ($ of renewals + $ of expansions) / Total $ of contracts up for renewal
So say you had $1,000 worth of contracts up for renewal. You had $500 worth of customers who actually renewed, plus $200 in expansion revenue. Your Net Renewal Rate would be ($500 + $200) / $1,000 = 0.7, or 70%.
If you’ve ever purchased a product and were then asked how satisfied you were with that product, you’ve provided a Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT).
CSAT is a super simple way to understand a user’s overall content or discontent with your product. To calculate CSAT, you ask your users to rank your product on some kind of numerical scale (1-3, 1-5, 1-10, etc.), and then you take the sum of the scores divided by the number of respondents.
CSAT= sum of scores / total number of respondents
While NPS measures overall satisfaction, CSAT typically measures a user’s satisfaction with a certain feature inside of your product.
This metric is most effective when you use it at the exact moment they just finished using that feature during their journey through your product.
Akvile DeFazio
AKvertise | President
Depending on the campaign objectives and where in the funnel those particular audiences are within those campaigns, we track a range of metrics for our clients. For an ecommerce client example, we typically prioritize website visitor landing page views, the cost per view, and CTR for prospecting campaigns to gauge their relevancy and interest in what we are showcasing.
For retargeting campaigns, we will focus more so on conversion-based metrics such as purchases, cost per purchase, conversion rate, and ROAS to determine the success of the campaign as well as overall holistic efforts within the account.
Aleksandra Mitroshkina
KernelCare | Product Marketing Manager of KernelCare
We track Customer Lifetime Value and Churn on a monthly basis. It is important for us to keep our clients out of churn and grow CLV exponentially. I believe it is applicable to any other type of business if they want to be successful. These metrics also help us make decisions about how much money to invest in acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones.
Alysha Schultz
Intuitive Digital | Sr. Brand Manager
The success metrics you focus on depend entirely on the goals for that work. For example, with SEO work, most often you're working to increase organic rankings and positions so we focus on keyword rankings, total count, and SERP positions. A lot of the blogging work we do is focused on increasing the number of keywords our partners rank for and then pushing them up the positions to increase site traffic.
For Paid Ads, if your goal is to increase bran awareness then the metrics we're tracking most closely are ad impressions and clicks. If we're trying to increase leads we'll be tracking ad clicks and conversion rate.
Andy Crestodina
Orbit Media Studios | Co-founder / CMO
Conversion rates, but with a segment that excludes visitors to start on a blog post.
We're in web development, so driving conversions is our job. But lead gen conversion rates aren't meaningful if you leave in all of those "information intent" visitors who drop by just to read blog posts. If a post goes viral, it depresses conversion rates. So often exclude those sessions with a quick segment.
Angela White
ProProfs Survey Maker | Product Analyst
Being a business owner, I track 5 customer success metrics to enjoy unwavering growth. I really get insights into how my brand is performing against customer expectations, thanks to such metrics. In short, they help me stay one step ahead of my competitors.
No brand can afford to ignore these customer success metrics unless there’s a wish to bite the dust.
Blaine Bertsch
Dryrun | CEO
At Dryrun – success for our clients is Job #1 and our key metric is "Time to First Value." But success doesn’t look the same for every client so we identify their key need and segment early on. We pride ourselves on finding how our platform can work for each client as each business is unique. Some look for transparency, some look for future proofing but all are looking for clarity to make strong business decisions.
Cash flow management is tricky, especially during this time in our economy, so transparency and knowledge improvements have become a strong success metric for Dryrun.
Reaching "Time to First Value" comes from several actions that we take. Segmentation, automated onboarding, automated messaging based on user actions, and opportunities to work with our in-house consultants to better understand how Dryrun can work for them, with their accounting platform, and within the complexities of their business.
Brett Casey
HealthMarkets | Executive Sales Leader
We use several metrics to make sure we are aware of our business performance in real time, but the most important hands down is repeat customers. People reached, impressions, cost per lead, cost per transaction, and numbers along those lines are always helpful, of course.
I am more interested in how well we keep client's on our products, how long they keep products, and if they are turning into repeat customers who send referrals...that's what I feel matters most.
Bryan Pattman
9Sail | Lead Digital Strategist
Total Number of Leads Through Digital Means - The majority of our clients hire us to increase the total number of leads that they get each month. As long as we continue to help them grow their sales pipeline and can show at least a 2x on their spend with us, they are happy.
We work with small to medium sized law firms and contractors so we know what the average lifetime value of a client or customer is and we make sure that we are able to drive enough leads through the clients website and Google My Business to show our value and help them expand their business, which helps us to market them even more because we get a larger service area or an increase in the number of practice areas that we are covering.
This is the most important metric for any business owner/marketing manager and it has allowed us to build extremely long-lasting relationships.
Casey Hill
Bonjoro | Head of Growth
MAU or Monthly Active Users is in my opinion, the #1 most valuable customer success metric for a SaaS organization that you can track. MAU basically indicates, are they logging in and actively using the solution. If your MAU is declining, it's an indicator that churn and problems are ahead. People who aren't using the software will always eventually churn.
MAU is called a "leading indicator" or a predictive metric of what is to come (vs. say churn, which is a lagging metric, you only know it when it happens). Keeping a pulse on this allows us to realize if there is systemic bugs, adoption hurdles or other problems we need to address preemptively.
Chris Dreyer
Rankings.io | CEO & Founder
We track the following - NPS, Retention, MRR, and Client Affinity (e.g., Happy or Sad)
Colin Mosier
JSL Marketing & Web Design | VP of Marketing & Sales
When it comes to customer success for a marketing campaign, there are a few metrics we like to track. We often track these metrics using Analytics or some other monitoring software.
First, we like to track different things like new users and new sessions. It we take a look at the amount of users or sessions that a website had before we implemented a new strategy and compare it to after the strategy was implemented, this can give us great insight! We also like to track the actual conversions of these new customers.
This can be monitored through goal tracking and if they are set up properly, we can accurately track when a new lead fills out a submission form, calls your business, or requests directions to your location.
These are some of the most important things to track because they can actually amount to new leads that are given to your sales team!
Corey Haines
Baremetrics | Head of Growth
Our main KPIs are Expansion Revenue, NPS, and Retention.
Expansion Revenue: We track this because our pricing value metric is based on MRR, and so tracking expansion revenue allows us to track how much value our customers are getting and thus how much they're paying us. Their growth = our growth. This gets reported monthly. NPS: We do a bi-annual survey to our customers to track declines or increases in satisfaction.
Retention: Customer churn and revenue churn are key to building a sustainable SaaS business. We like to stay in the 2-4% monthly range for each and report on this monthly, while monitoring daily.
Craig Morison
Fast Cover Travel Insurance | COO
There’s always a tendency to look at a multitude of customer metrics when analysing performance. Whilst I think it’s very important to capture as much data as possible so you can report on any metric if you wish, it’s more important to figure out what metrics to focus on. Depending on the business’s lifecycle stage and its business goals, you should be able to get that down to two or three metrics to really focus on and go after moving that metric.
My 3 preferred metrics for growth are:
Reporting of metrics must be live in a dashboard and allow you to have answers to your questions instantly when you want them. Reports should be able to be viewed by hour, day, week, month etc so you can identify any trends and compare performance to previous periods.
Daria Ivanova
Influ2 | Head of ABM
At Influ2, we track logo and revenue churn as the main customer success metrics. Since Influ2 is an enterprise-focused product, we cannot track NPS and product engagement. We try to assess the health of each client individually by tracking product performance metrics.
In our case, these are CTR and the number of generated MQLs per ad campaign. For clients who demonstrate low results for the given metrics, we hold customer success interviews. This straightforward approach has allowed us to achieve negative revenue churn.
Fiona Adler
HR Partner | Director
Customer retention and customer referrals are by far the best ways to measure customer success. Other metrics track what customers say, but these hone in on what customers actually do. If customers are staying with you and referring their contacts, then you know you're doing most things right.
Ian Evenstar
UNINCORPORATED | CEO
UNINCORPORATED is a higher education marketing, branding and design agency so the metrics we track for our clients are prospective student leads, applications started, submitted, and ultimately enrolled students. These metrics give us a high level view of the program's health and how many students we can expect to enroll in the upcoming cohort.
If any one part of the funnel is low compared to previous years, we know where to focus our energy in the coming weeks. We report on these metrics during every team sync meeting, which is typically every 2 weeks. On a monthly and quarterly basis we report on a broader spectrum of metrics including page visitors, top performing content, web and social media engagement, and paid advertising ROAS among many others.
James McGrath
Yoreevo | Co-Founder
We absolutely love to see referrals because they're the ultimate sign of customer success. It's one thing for a customer to have a good experience but a referral shows you they had a great experience and trust you with someone they care about. There is no higher compliment.
James Pollard
The Advisor Coach LLC | Founder
Because I have a monthly paper-and-ink newsletter subscription, the biggest customer success metric that my business tracks is customer retention rate. How long someone stays subscribed is a good proxy for how satisfied someone is with the content. Increasing this number has a direct impact on customer lifetime value as well.
We have a trailing average retention rate that gets updated on the first of every month. If this metric dips below the average, we know the content needs to be improved. If it's above the average, it's a signal that we're doing something right.
For example, one of the best things we ever did to increase the average customer retention rate is to send out a welcome letter in the mail to new subscribers. This lets them know we appreciate them and tells them to keep an eye out for their first newsletter issue. We never would have known how big of an improvement this made if we didn't track the metric.
Jasz Joseph
SyncShow | Senior Associate, Account Manager
We measure NPS on a quarterly basis via an all-client survey. We use NPS because it is very simple and straightforward. It does not take our clients much time to complete and it does not leave us too much room for interpretation or misunderstanding.
For clients who give us a low NPS score, we reach out to have a personal 1:1 conversation about what is going on and how we can improve. When clients give us a strong NPS score, we ask them to share publicly via an online review.
Jennifer Lux
LyntonWeb | VP, Client Experience
NPS and sentiment surveys at three times in the first 60 days. Surveying in different formats and front-loading surveys toward the beginning of the partnership helps us detect any misaligned expectations or potential challenges during the time when friction is most likely to arise.
Jói Sigurdsson
CrankWheel | CEO
Our north star metric is something we call 7-day engaged agents. These are users who have used CrankWheel for two or more meetings or customer discussions in the last week. Our product's value goes strongly hand in hand with how much usage it gets, and our pricing also reflects that.
For customers who are being onboarded, the growth in their number of engaged agents is the main barometer we use to see if they are likely to be successful, with total number of meetings as a secondary measure.
Josh Ho
Referral Rock | CEO
Health Score - How well a client is doing getting value from our platform - Daily
Days to Launch - How fast they complete their setup and launch to their audience - Weekly
Juli Durante
Impulse Creative | Director of Inbound
As an agency, our biggest customer success metric are our customers' success metrics. We measure how we're doing with clients by the progress they're making toward their business goals. Our objective is to extend out clients' teams and introduce programs and tactics that improve the entire customer lifecycle. We're successful in doing this when our clients hit lead gen, profitability, revenue, or customer retention goals.
We measure goals often and are transparent about what we find. We monitor weekly, report monthly, and reassess strategy quarterly to ensure everyone is one the same page and everything is moving forward.
Ken Marshall
Doorbell Digital Marketing | CEO
We send clients a survey after an engagement with our company or after the first 3-4 months of a campaign.
It asks them to score their level of satisfaction on a scale from 1-10 (10 being extremely satisfied) of the following:
We track these because I've found that if we can regularly communicate with clients, transparently describe what we've done so far for them, and objectively measure their campaigns with metrics that are meaningful to their business, we'll be viewed as a massively valuable partner long term.
Kent Lewis
Anvil Media | President
As a digital marketing agency, we have a few key success metrics we use to measure the health of our business:
Khaled Naim
Onfleet | CEO & Co-Founder
Kurt Uhlir
Showcase IDX | Chief Marketing Officer
The three I track the most are daily/weekly usage, the number of leads our customers generate, and our referral rate.
Tracking either daily or weekly usage confirms that our customers lives are being impacted. While there are some solutions that are "set it and forget it", that's not the case with Martech like ours that provides the IDX home search on real estate agent websites. Ultimately, our customers are using us to generate new leads and stay connected to past clients.
We track the total number leads, both total and active, for our customers to ensure they are receiving the value and if not, this allows us to reach out and help them with best practices. I also like to track our company's referral rate. Happy customers tell their friends and colleagues.
Leanne Schmidt
BookedIN | Marketing Director
We live in an increasingly data-driven world. Tracking customer success metrics serves a dual purpose - we can optimize our platform with insight those metrics bring us, all while advertising and celebrating our client’s successes.
We save clients time and money. In light of that, we’ve gathered and disseminated data about how many appointments for our clients were handled by their clients through our platform instead of being handled by staff (almost 50% on average).
We’ve also gathered data about the average payment for these bookings ($20-$50), the total amount of booking fees collected ($4.2 million), and the number of payments processed.
Lydia Sugarman
Venntive | CEO
I'm a bottom-line sales professional and business owner. It is important to monitor fall-off rates all along the marketing-sales funnel, at the end of the day the most important success metric is the number of new accounts and the new added revenue. Seriously, if there's no revenue, there's no company.
Matthew Laurin
Esq.Marketing | President
We help law firms generate more clients and cases from Google search so we closely track keyword rankings and organic search traffic on client websites. On a monthly basis, we pay close attention to where our clients are positioned for their target keyword phrases and how their traffic from organic search is progressing.
On the other side of that coin are the phone calls, chat sessions, and form fills they receive from their website. All of that data combined paints a picture of whether or not their SEO campaign is succeeding.
Mirva Saarijärvi
Wirepas | Head of Marketing and Communication
Customer success tracking is not just the bottom line or sales numbers but to me, it has two elements: How we see our own performance as to having built a customer base and also how our customers view our performance towards them.
When we measure our own performance:
When measuring customer success from the customer's point of view, we tend to send them regularly a questionnaire on how we've been goind and how to improve and that gives us numerical data. We do this both on sales and technical level.
Customer success metrics seen from different point of views will have a clear effect on the bottom line.
Natalie Athanasiadis
Ormi Media | Founder
The metrics we track include conversions specific to each campaign and its goals. This could include revenue generated, contact form submissions and calls booked. We monitor the progress through the month but formal review, reporting and discussion happens once a month.
Nate Tower
Perrill | Marketing Director
As a service-based company that's heavily focused on client retention, we closely track customer churn rate, monthly recurring revenue, and customer lifetime value. We report on customer churn rate and monthly recurring revenue on a weekly basis. These metrics all help to forecast our business, and they also give us insight into how much we can spend on new customer acquisition costs.
Changes in customer churn rate also quickly alert us to any issues we might be facing on a larger level. We are working on better identifying ways to predict customer churn before it happens.
Paige Arnof-Fenn
Mavens & Moguls | Founder & CEO
The best KPI for a professional service firm like mine is really customer satisfaction and specifically Net Promoter Score because repeat customers and referrals are key, the most cost efficient way to build a business and scale your brand in my experience. Would they recommend it to others? This is important to understand for insights into why your brand matters.
Quincy Smith
ESL Authority | Founder
Our business model is based around recruiting so our customer success "north star" is referrals - we offer money for successful referrals from past clients as well as follow up with them regularly to ask for candidates.
This metric is valuable for 2 reasons - if we're able to convert these referalls then it means more money for the company, but even if we can't it's a great indicator of how we're doing our job.
Richard Howe
Colour Rich | Front-end designer
We often track Customer Lifetime Value, which estimates the total revenue generated by an individual during their time as a customer. By increasing this metric, growth can be achieved from the existing customer base alone.
We also track Churn Rate for our larger clients that sell memberships and subscriptions. It's an important factor because a high churn rate (customers not renewing) can hold back the company growth.
Ruby Rusine
Social Success Marketing | Chief, Social Media Strategist
As a social media marketing consultant, I know that there is a cornucopia of metrics that any company can use to track success. However, just because it’s there doesn’t mean that we track all of it because not every metric is relevant. We only focus on metrics that resonate with the goal/s of the client.
As an example, a client’s goal is to grow engagement of one of their social media profiles. The success metric that we use for that is the engagement rate. Engagement rate is made up of non-passive actions that customers do to a post.
Another client has traffic to the website as their goal, to measure success and because we are a social media management company, we look at the amount of traffic that each social media platform contributes to the site, but not only, we also look at how long users are staying on the pages they visit.
While those whose key goal is to make a sale, the success metric for that would be the purchases.
We submit reports every month to track progress.
Ryan Dunagan
SPOTIO | VP of Marketing
At Spotio we're focused on end-user satisfaction, product usage, and churn. We watch these numbers daily and report on them weekly.
Saif Sadiq
Outgrow | Product Marketing Manager
Tommy Landry
Return On Now | President and Founder
Although all of the customer success metrics provide useful information, we focus heavily on retention, customer lifetime value, and recurring monthly revenues.
A lot of industry folks focus strictly on churn rate, which is a fine metric. However, you can have an ongoing steady churn rate but retain a core group of loyal customers over time. For this reason, we look at it a bit differently than a standard ecomm business would.
Customer lifetime value is a big one. If you know which customers are providing the largest contribution to your bottom line over time, you can better focus efforts for cross/upsell, customer service, and other perks.
In our specific business, we have a mix of recurring and one-time, project based revenue. While we are happy to take on projects, any savvy business owner knows that recurring revenue is a must for growing the company. We like to have at least 50% recurring revenue on a monthly basis. Should that number fall below half, we spend time and effort to rebalance the equation.
Urszula Rzad
Piwik PRO | Head of Customer Success
When it comes to customer success measurement, here at Piwik PRO we take several metrics into consideration. First, we check product adoption rate. It lets us assess to what level customers have become familiar with our platform. We have a defined set of factors, for example the number and type of created events, that we feed into an overall adoption rate metric.
Having a high adoption rate means that we know our customers feel comfortable using our platform. It also indicates that onboarding has been effective. In order to get more detailed information about adoption, we drill down into the usage of particular features. This gives us valuable insights on how users interact with our product to achieve their goals – what features and elements are crucial for them.
At the same time, it's essential information for our product teams, who will better monitor which elements make our customers happy and which should be enhanced.
Finally, once per quarter we measure our clients' Net Promoter Score. We not only focus on the score itself, but further inquire via email or telephone to understand what factors influenced our clients’ answers.
Wil Parker
Rankings.io | Director of Client Success
Tracking all sorts of things like conversion rates, improved metrics, keyword progress, traffic, and so on, is great and all. But I prefer to keep my eye on one key metric that matters the most.
Client happiness. Are my clients happy with what they are paying for? I say this because each and every client has a different goal in mind in which they will deem as a success for them. For example, not every client wants to go after a boat load of fresh new traffic. Perhaps, they want to go after a very small niche of traffic.
If we work together and attain of the goal of going after this small niche, then my client is happy and this success metric is a positive one. Each and every client needs to be given a unique goal with the overall end goal with them ending up as satisfied as possible with their requested outcome (ROI).
This post originally appeared on the parlor.io blog but was rewritten and republished after the company rebranded in 2022.
