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Are you tired of juggling too many metrics and still feeling unsure about your customers' true health? For many Customer Success Managers (CSMs), the challenge isn’t a lack of data – it’s figuring out which metrics really matter and how to track them effectively.
In this blog, we’ll walk through the key customer success metrics you should focus on and how to manage them efficiently. By the end, you’ll have a clear understanding of how to use these metrics to improve your processes and learn how certain tools can help along the way.
Key Customer Success metrics to track
When it comes to managing customer success, not all metrics are created equal. The right metrics give you a clear understanding of your customers' satisfaction, health, and likelihood of staying with your product or service long-term.
These are some of the most important metrics to track:
1. Customer churn rate
Churn rate refers to the percentage of customers who leave or stop doing business with you over a given period.
It’s one of the most critical metrics for Customer Success Managers because high churn rates directly impact your company’s growth and long-term sustainability. If customers are leaving faster than you can replace them, you’re in trouble.
The main challenge here is that churn is often the result of multiple issues – poor onboarding, lack of engagement, or misaligned expectations. To combat this, tracking and analyzing churn regularly helps identify the causes early on, allowing you to intervene before it’s too late.
You can calculate the churn rate of your business easily with this calculator.
2. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer satisfaction and loyalty by asking a simple question: “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?” A high NPS indicates strong customer loyalty, while a low NPS signals areas for improvement.
One challenge with NPS is gathering timely and actionable feedback. Relying on manual surveys often results in incomplete data, making it harder to take meaningful action.
Automating these surveys is a great way to ensure consistent feedback collection and analysis. With Velaris, you can build customized NPS surveys and automatically analyze the responses in one place, enabling faster and more efficient feedback loops.
Find out the NPS score for your customers with the help of this calculator.
3. Customer health score
A customer health score is a predictive measure that uses various data points (like engagement, product usage, and support interactions) to assess the overall satisfaction and loyalty of your customers. It’s a vital metric for anticipating potential churn and identifying opportunities for upselling.
However, tracking all the necessary data points to calculate an accurate health score can be tricky. Many CSMs struggle to consolidate data from different sources, leading to an incomplete or inaccurate picture of customer health.
One way to fix this is by creating a template for health scores that your team can use to ensure you’re tracking the same metrics each time. The next way would be by automating the process using a system like Velaris that integrates data from all relevant touchpoints.
Velaris offers the ability to monitor a customized customer health score by pulling in data from across your teams, ensuring you always have an up-to-date view of your customers’ well-being.
4. Net Revenue Retention
Net Revenue Retention (NRR) measures the percentage of recurring revenue retained from existing customers over a specific period, factoring in expansions, downgrades, and churn. It’s calculated as:
A high NRR indicates strong customer retention and expansion, reflecting customer satisfaction and the value they find in your product. Companies with high NRR grow revenue without relying solely on new customers, signaling healthy business growth.
NRR can be tricky to track, since it involves several other metrics which can complicate revenue measurement. Churn rate, for instance, has a delayed impact on revenue, particularly in businesses with annual contracts. This lag can make it harder to track the immediate effect of customer losses.
Having real-time analytics and deep visibility into customer revenue trends is crucial for overcoming the complexities of monitoring NRR.
Use this calculator to help you out in calculating NRR.
5. Customer lifetime value (CLV)
Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a projection of how much revenue a customer will bring to your business over the course of their relationship with you. It’s an essential metric for understanding the long-term impact of your customer relationships and making strategic decisions about resource allocation.
Calculating CLV can be challenging, especially if data is siloed across sales, marketing, and support teams. Without a comprehensive view, it’s difficult to gauge the full impact of a customer relationship. As we said before, integrating tools that unite this data would be a more efficient way of accurately measuring such metrics.
This calculator can also make things easier in calculating CLV.
Tracking these key customer success metrics is essential for understanding your customers and driving long-term growth. However, as you’ve seen, doing this manually can lead to inefficiencies and missed insights.
In the next section, we’ll explore how to choose the right metrics for your business and why focusing on the most relevant ones will set you up for success.
How to choose the right metrics for your business
One of the biggest hurdles in Customer Success is figuring out which metrics to focus on. It’s easy to get caught up in tracking everything, thinking that more data will lead to better decisions.
But in reality, tracking too many metrics can be overwhelming. Instead of giving you clarity, it often causes confusion and dilutes your focus. Here are some guidelines to pick the right metrics:
Align with Business Goals
Keep it simple and focus on the metrics that directly impact your business goals and customer satisfaction. Ask yourself: what do you need to know to ensure your customers are happy, and how does that connect to your company’s bottom line?
For example, if you want to increase retention, focus on metrics like churn rate and NRR.
Map the Customer Journey
You can map out your customer lifecycle and identify key stages. Then you can choose metrics that reflect success at each stage.
For example:
- Acquisition Stage: Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Conversion Rate.
- Onboarding Stage: Time to Value (TTV), Onboarding Completion Rate.
- Engagement Stage: Feature Adoption, Active Users.
- Retention Stage: NPS, Renewal Rate, Churn Rate.
Prioritize Actionable Metrics
Select metrics you can influence through specific actions. For instance, if low product usage impacts retention, you can run campaigns to encourage feature adoption or provide targeted training.
Avoid focusing on vanity metrics (e.g., high page views) that look good but don't offer meaningful insights by themselves.
Adapt Regularly
Metrics that are relevant today may not remain so as your business evolves.
For example, Early-stage startups may prioritize CAC, while mature businesses might focus on NRR and CLV.
Regularly assess your chosen metrics and refine them based on shifting goals and market dynamics.
By narrowing your focus to a few key metrics, you’ll not only gain better insights but also reduce the complexity of your day-to-day operations.
Next, we'll dive deeper into how you can automate the process of tracking these metrics.
Automating your customer success metrics tracking
When you’re handling multiple customer accounts and tracking various metrics, manual processes can quickly become overwhelming. It’s easy for important details to slip through the cracks, and the time spent managing these processes often outweighs the benefits. That’s why automation isn’t just a luxury – it’s a necessity for today’s Customer Success teams.
Reducing manual tasks and increasing efficiency
Manual tracking can lead to errors, inconsistencies, and wasted time. You’re stuck sifting through data, updating spreadsheets, and manually analyzing trends. This not only makes your job harder but also delays the actionable insights you need to improve your customer relationships.
Automating routine tasks – like updating customer health scores or tracking NPS responses – frees up your time to focus on high-impact activities, like strategic planning or customer engagement.
With automation, you can ensure accuracy and reduce human error. Instead of spending hours on repetitive tasks, you can rely on tools that handle the data collection and analysis for you, giving you more confidence in the metrics you’re tracking.
For instance, you can automate key aspects of your processes using Velaris' drag-and-drop automation builder. This tool allows you to set up workflows that track and monitor customer success metrics without the need for constant manual input.
Real-time visibility for better decision-making
Another challenge many CSMs face is dealing with outdated or fragmented data. Real-time visibility into your key metrics helps you make informed decisions faster, whether it’s identifying an at-risk account or spotting upsell opportunities.
A centralized dashboard is essential for bringing all your metrics into one view. Instead of jumping between multiple systems, you can track customer health, churn risk, and customer satisfaction in real time, ensuring that you’re always up to date.
Velaris’s dashboard provides this kind of unified visibility, making it easier to stay on top of your metrics and make quick, data-driven decisions that benefit both your team and your customers.
By automating your customer success metrics tracking and gaining real-time visibility, you’ve already taken a big step toward a more efficient and proactive approach to managing your customer relationships.
Conclusion
Focusing on the right customer success metrics is essential to truly understanding your customers and making informed decisions that drive long-term success.
But tracking those metrics manually can lead to errors, lost time, and missed opportunities. By automating your processes and bringing all your key metrics into one place, you can eliminate inefficiencies and act on insights much faster.
If you’re looking to reduce manual work and gain better control over your customer success metrics, book a demo today and see how Velaris can help you address the challenges you face.
