With more companies creating and expanding their customer success teams than ever before, it's critical that leadership focuses on the right metrics to accurately gauge their work. Remember, customer success is much more than just an extension of customer support, so typical metrics like average ticket close time are not an effective way to measure the team's contribution to your company.

Let's look at the 5 most important metrics for 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, 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, or conversely how many customers leave, is essential to any success team. This is known as customer churn.

2). Average Customer Value - Simply put, not all customers are created equal. That's why many companies keep track of how much, on average, each customer is spending with their business. Calculate your total revenue (this can be done annually, quarterly, or with whichever frequency you would like to compare data), then divide it by how many customers you have. The result is your average customer value. This metric provides insight into how the bottom line is affected 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/Distress - A more sophisticated way for a success team to understand their customer base is through customer health or customer distress scores. With NPS (Net Promoter Score) and reviews, you're relying on a customer to tell you whether they're happy or unhappy. Distress and health scores don't rely on 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 weight your customer distress score to emphasize ticket close time over other factors. This means that a customer with several tickets that are open for a week or longer will see their distress score increase, flagging your success team to intervene.

5). Customer Upselling Revenue - The primary focus of a customer success team is managing the customer relationship. While churn is obviously important to monitor, it's also vital that success makes the most of happy customers and offers additional products or services that can benefit the customer and expand the company's revenue. This can be monitored by keeping an eye on the total upselling or expansion revenue amount from your customer success team. It can also be a good indicator of customer satisfaction and can be tracked to spot success team members 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.

About TeamSupport

TeamSupport was designed from the ground up by B2B support professionals, especially for mission-critical organizations where customer relationships are imperative. The TeamSupport enterprise solution offers an array of tools that make it simple for teams to work together, share information, and access their collective knowledge to solve customer challenges. TeamSupport makes it easier to support teams to resolve individual tickets while managing the overall customer relationship. Find out more at www.teamsupport.com.

Laura Ballam
VP of Marketing
TeamSupport, LLC

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