In most of the industries, it is always advisable to keep the current customers rather than to win new ones as losing a big account can impact the ROI greatly. Therefore, it is important that the sales leaders not only track the pipeline metrics, but also look into the insights of the customer success efforts. Customer success metrics reveal whether enough is being done to keep the customers hooked to your business and whether or not they are renewing the contracts.
Let us look at some of the most important analytics to monitor the effectiveness of your customer success metrics.
It measures the percentage of customers that do not renew their contracts. It shows the reverse of customer retention rate. It is a gauge of how satisfied your customers are and helps you discern which types of customers renew their contracts frequently.
- Pilot program success rate
It measures the rate of success of your pilot programs. It is the ratio of the number of pilot programs that convert into customers to the total number of pilot programs in a specific period. In the pilot period, the customers can experience using particular software for a trial period before committing to it long-term. If you do not succeed in retaining a lot of customers after the trial period, it means that your customer success team needs to provide better support to the customers during the program and make them commit to contracts.
- Free to paid conversion rate
This is a measure of the total percentage of customers that get upgraded from free to premium. These days, it is a trend to offer a freemium model which means that the app or software is free for use but comes with limited functionality. The customer would, then, need to pay in order to gain access to additional features. Companies that follow this model need to keep an eye on this rate in order to learn whether or not the sales and marketing efforts are successfully motivating the customers to purchase the premium offering. This rate also helps you notice the trends in the customer behaviour over time.
This measures the total time taken from the signing of contract to when the client is up and running. Long onboarding programs often start contracts off on the wrong foot. For example, if it takes too many weeks to implement new marketing automation or sales acceleration tool, then it could affect your customers’ quarter. A short onboarding time ensures that the customers start deriving value off your product a lot sooner.
This gauge tracks how many times do the customers log into your product daily. This gives a bird’s-eye-view of the overall product usage. A decline in the measure could act as a warning signal that the customers are reducing the usage of the product and need to be properly nurtured.
This keeps a track of the total amount of time for which the customers are using your product in a day. It is basically the ability to measure how often a particular customer uses your product on a particular day. A low value of this measure could mean that the customer success representatives should intervene and discover why the customers aren’t using the product. This enables you to address the key issues before they give rise to a churn.
This gauge measures the total cost of the sales, marketing, support and customer success efforts in order to retain or keep the customers. It is important to keep a track of both your customer acquisition and retention costs. A lot of effort is involved in supporting the customers properly. There is a lot of sales cost involved in up-sells. Marketing is also involved with creating support and customer success collateral.
These are some of the most important sales metrics, but not all of it. There is more to the list of measures that can help you gauge customer success and increase your customer retention rate.