Article by: Iamshaaani Strategic Business Analyst & Business Intelligence.

12 customer success metrics 'KPI' and how to measure customer success.

12 Key customer success metrics and how to measure them.

If you are ignoring customer success metrics, then consider yourself navigating a ship without a compass. Customer Success KPIs provide you a sense of how well your connections with customers are doing and present you with a path forward for bettering your products and services. 

Global market size of customer success platforms is forecasted to rise approx. 20%, reaching $3.5 billion till 2027.

Let categories into 2 groups.

1. KPIs to measure customer success, support, and engagement

2. KPIs to measure business health and revenue

Key performance indicators (KPIs) for customer success are quantitative/numerical representations of how well a customer has adopted, used, and recommended your product to other potential customers. Customer metrics show how well your customer contact and support channels are working, as well as how well your customer success team is performing. 

They can offer insightful information on important topics like customer journey, support quality, and satisfaction and etc. Measuring the clients' success also helps you stay on track and enhances your products and services.  

Let's now examine the customer success KPIs pertaining to Customer Success, Support, and Engagement in more detail.

When measuring customer satisfaction, the long-debated question comes down to CSAT, there are other KPIs too but today we will discuss the only CSAT 'Customer Satisfaction'? 

1. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT):

customer satisfaction score measures Customers' level of satisfaction with your brand, products, and services. CSAT is the most accurate and straightforward performance metrics for a business that can be used to measure the specific interaction of customers. 

High CSAT score presupposes high customer loyalty and more customer acquisition.

Why is CSAT score important.

CSAT is one of the most important customer success indicators that firms should monitor since it has been demonstrated to have a direct impact on revenue growth. It usually comprises two components: your support and your product. 

A study revealed that approx. 83% of buyers consider good customer services when they purchase product or services and approx. more than 65% that experience poor customer services do not buy again from them. 

CSAT score will help you identify your weaknesses and opportunities 'SWOT' improve your business processes.

How to calculate customer satisfaction score

To calculate your CSAT score, we have to create a survey customer to ask how satisfied they are with our products or services. Ask customers to answer the questions on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 very unsatisfied and 5 very satisfied). 

Once data collected from customers, take the number of customers that rated you 4 or 5 and divide that by the total number of responses.

Customer success metrics: Customer satisfaction score formula

American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) show that a good CSAT score varies between 73% and 77%. So, when tracking metric, ensure your score is in this range.

2. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Score: a business KPI that measures the probability of a client suggesting a product and service to other friends, family or social circle. 

Importance of NPS in Customer Satisfaction

NPS could be a pointer of future growth and could be a growth point between your clients and business. NPS tell us how a customer is happy with our products and services. 

How to calculate NPS for Customer Satisfaction

We can calculate NPS by asking our customers: "How would you likely to recommend our products and services to your friends/social circle?" so we give customer reply from 0 to 10 and we categories these into 3 different sections as under

Detractors: In Detractor we place the number of customers that provide ratings from 0 to 6. These customers are not happy with products/services and more chance to tell other friend/circle not to buy from us.

Passive: In Passive we place the number of customers that provide ratings from 7 to 8. These customers are happy with products/services but as they are ready to buy product/services from any other that provide more batter and attractive offer from us.

Promoters: In Promoter we place the number of customers that provide ratings from 9 to 10. Promoters' customer are most valuable customers, and positively promote our products/services to friends/circle.

How to calculate the NPS: Simply we can subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. 

3. Customer Health Score 

When we talk about Customer Support metric/KPI then Customer health score is the one that is used to measures, Will a customer continue using your products/services or stop buying. We will use it to track the risk of losing customers and we can also check; how can we improve our customer experience.

Why is Customer Health Score?

Customer health score tell us about the customers who are trying to churn. We can stop this by using and tracking this KPI.

How to calculate customer health score

Consider what you want to achieve, like you want to achieve more and more loyal customers/users that remain with you for long time?

Or aim to reduce churn rate by 15% in next 3 months? One you set the target what you want to ahieve, you can relate this target with the targeted customers with target customer success KPIs.

At this point you have to choose the metrics that you want to use for customer success. Examples of metrics for Customer Behaviour that used to measure the Customer Health Score. 

1. Product Usage Breadth and Depth

2. Account Expansion and Biling Metrics

3. Retention and Churn Rates

4. Customer Engagement Metrics

5. Product Feedback 

6. Support Ticket History

We can measure the Health of Customer by setting up a Scoring System. like, 

Frequently contact support team will lead to adding points to a customer’s overall score and we can reduce the points whenever a customer gives the negative feedback. 

We can Visualize the health score of any customers that tell about Customer. We can use different types of scoring systems that are available, like

Color code

Percentage scale

Alphabetical scale

4. First Contact Resolution Rate

First Contact Resolution Rate 'FCR' a metric used for to collect the number of customers who issues resolved in First Interaction with the Support Team.

Why is FCR important?

As say first impression mater a lot, same way when problem resolved in first contact make a positive impact and save lot more time like follow-up from both Customer and Company side. 

First Contact Resolution Rate FRC is directly proportional to the Customer Satisfaction and Retention. More the FCR rate, more will be customer satisfaction and more the customer retention. 

How to calculate FCR rate

FCR rate calculated by dividing the number of cases resolved on the first contact by total number of issues handled by agents then multiply it with 100.

Let take a real time example:

In total 700 customer, and 301 issues are resolved on the first contact, then FCR rate is 40%, that is very low. Normally 75% FCR rates consider as satisfactory, and 90% FCR rates considered as high.