The Top 5 Most Important Customer Success Metrics to Track

With more companies creating and expanding their customer success teams than ever before, it’s critical that leadership focuses on the right customer success metrics to accurately gauge their work. Remember, this team isn’t just an extension of customer support, so common metrics like average ticket close time will fail at accurately representing their contribution to your company.

Getting straight to the point, let’s look at the 5 most important metrics to customer success teams and how monitoring these important data points can have a valuable impact on your business…

1) Customer Churn Rate - Loyal customers are the backbone of any business. Not only do they keep revenue stable, but they also allow your company to have the financial flexibility and freedom to take risks and pursue new opportunities. That’s why monitoring how long your customers stick around, also known as customer churn, is essential to any success team.

2) Average Customer Value (ACV) – Simply put, not all customers are created equal. That’s why many companies keep track of how much, on average, each customer is worth to their business. Calculate the total number of years all your customers have been working with your business, then divide it by the how many customers you have. This will get your ACV metric. Monitoring the ACV will allow companies to see immediately what happens to the bottom line when a customer churns.

3) Customer Satisfaction (NPS and Reviews) – Churn and ACV let you know the impact of customers leaving. What they don’t tell you is why customers are leaving. That’s where satisfaction data, including customer reviews and NPS (Net Promoter Score) information, can tell the broader story. Looking at your reviews is a good start, be it from customer support interactions or third-party listing sites. This information is great for getting “at risk” customers on the radar of a customer success team so they can intervene right away.

4) Customer Health and Distress – Another more sophisticated way for a success team to learn about customers that are unhappy is through customer health and customer distress scores. With NPS and reviews, you’re relying on a customer to tell you they’re unhappy. Distress and health scores don’t need this action from the customer. Often found within support software and success technology, these scores are calculated by combining several factors and can be unique to the needs of your business. For example, if your industry places a strong emphasis on making sure tickets don’t stay open long, you can change the weights on your customer distress score to emphasize ticket close time. This way, a customer with several tickets that are open for a week or longer will see their distress score increase.5) Customer Upselling Revenue – The primary focus of a success team is managing the customer relationship. While churn is obviously important, it’s also vital that success makes the most of when customers are happy. This can be monitored by keeping an eye on the total upselling revenue amount from your customer success team. It can be a good secondary indicator of customer satisfaction and can be tracked to spot opportunities for success employees that may also thrive in a sales role.

We hope this list of the top 5 most important metrics to customer success teams was valuable. While the concept of customer success may still be expanding into the greater business world, there are many ways to track its direct impact on the bottom line of any business.