You need 3 kinds of Customer Success metrics. Do you have all 3?

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Customer success organizations usually maintain decent internal metrics, churn rates being the centerpiece and typically including more details on renewals, upgrades, customer scorecards, onboarding performance, etc.

But that’s only one of three categories of customer success metrics, the other two being customer metrics, metrics shared with customers and used by customers, and voice-of-customer metrics, metrics used by the larger organization to improve products and strategy based on customer feedback.

Customer Metrics

It may seem inappropriate, even rude to push metrics on customers, but they love it, at least if the metrics are useful. For instance, customers like to see their progress on:

  • Usage: Are their users taking advantage of the product or service? Are certain groups or geographies heavy users? What parts of the product are most useful?
  • Training: Are users taking advantage of learning tools? Are required certifications on track?
  • Goal achievement: Are they meeting the objectives they had with the product? (This, of course, assumes that you bothered to ask them, recorded the result, and instrumented the monitoring!)
  • Support interactions: Are support requests being handled swiftly? Are bugs getting fixed and enhancement requests implemented?
  • Peer performance: How are they doing compared to other customers? Are they significantly ahead or behind in any area?

Note that many of the metrics above match what may appear in customer scorecards, but they would be presented in a way that makes sense for customers. Ideally they would be included in the customer portal and available in real time.

Voice-of-Customer Metrics

The customer success team is ideally placed to gather and structure customer input to improve internal processes. In particular:

  • Sales: Are we acquiring the right kinds of customers? What profiles of customers are best suited for long-term success? What customers are most likely to renew and expand?
  • Engineering: What products/product areas are particularly appreciated or not? This goes way beyond bugs (which presumably, would be reported from tech support’s experience) and uses support cases, CSAT ratings, and other means to probe the entire customer experience, not just bugs
  • Product marketing: What do customers want next? As for bugs, formally-recorded enhancement requests are only part of the story. Also include feedback from CSM discussions, customer boards, etc.

Are you collecting metrics for all 3 categories, customer success, customers, and voice-of-customer? Tell us about your experience.

And if you need help designing customer success metrics, please ask.