Introduction
Customer loyalty & happiness has become a key factor in winning the customer success game as it is widely considered to be the most important tool in sales & marketing. A plan made to benefit your customers has two-fold advantages – it leads to customers’ gain & your business benefits as you eventually win customers’ loyalty. All businesses have a propensity to deliver positive customer experience but they are not sure how it’s going; customer success metrics help in defining that. This helps in positioning yourself as a customer-centric business whose products & services are delivering a good impact on customers’ daily life. As a customer centric business your bent is to constantly provide value to customers by orienting your missions to their specific needs, but this is only half of the story, you need to know where your efforts are going, how much impactful they are? And that is where customer success metrics SaaS help. In this blog, I will take you through eight very important customer metrics & I will also guide you on how to calculate them.
Customer Health Score
As a customer centric business, you need to go beyond the regular customer interactions through emails & phone calls & look at the bigger picture. The question is, are customers actually seeing value in your products & services? In order to determine the customer health score, you will have to ask these four questions – How frequently are your customers using your products? What is the impact of your products on your customers’ life? How is it impacting their business? Has it managed to remove their pain points? Calculating customer health scores will result in customer success management and will ensure that your customers are not only surviving but thriving with your products & services. These are the inputs in calculating customer health score—
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
This top customer success metric answers how likely a customer is to recommend your business to other customers. The NPS is important because it gives both quantitative & qualitative information about your customers. In this method, participants are asked to rate their experience on the scale of 1 to 10. Once you have the score you can find out what customers think about your business. Here customers are classified as Promoters (9-10 ratings), Passives (7 to 8 ratings), & Detractors (0-6).
Churn Rate
You gotta keep it low, it indicates the percentage of customers who leave your service, out of dissatisfaction or other reasons, over a given time period and is a good indicator to measure customer success manager performance. Customer churn examples include – subscription cancellation, account closure, contract non-renewal, & customers decision to buy others’ products or service. To calculate churn rate, you will have to quantify these events and determine what customer attrition means to you.
Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA)
As the name suggests it is a measure of average revenue per customer or revenue generated per account calculated in a fixed time period usually month or year. It helps in calculating a company’s revenue & growth of each account & helps in classifying high value & low value customers. It’s an important metric which helps in managing customer success.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
Customer satisfaction score signifies how satisfied a customer is with your product or service. Often, marketers use CSAT to determine how satisfied a customer is at key interaction times such as at the purchase time, at onboarding time, a support ticket closure, or at email or telephone exchange time. Just like the NPS, to calculate CSAT you will have to conduct a survey, however, do remember to conduct the survey right after customer interaction.
Customer Retention Cost (CRC)
This metric is different from the others as it calculates cost in terms of money. CRC is the total expense which a company has to bear in order to retain its existing customers. To calculate CRC, you will have to add all costs necessary for customer retention & engagement. It is an important metric which helps in running customer success programs. CRC helps in smart business decision making as it differentiates between the cost of retaining an existing customer and acquiring a new customer.
Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
Monthly recurring revenue is a normalized measure which a business is expected to earn every month. With the help of this measure you get a pulse over how much the number of customers or their spending has increased since they started their journey with you. You can compare two sets of MRRs generated over different time periods to calculate how much your customers’ revenue has increased over time. This metric is an important measure for SaaS companies because they function on a pay-as-you-go model. Let’s go through this example of calculating MRR. You have 22 customers and they pay $100 per month, then your MRR will be, 22 X 100 = $2200.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) indicates the total revenue a business can expect from a particular customer account. It takes into account a customer’s revenue value and multiplies it with that customer’s expected lifespan. Business owners consider this metric very important as it helps them to identify the most valuable customer segments. In general, research has shown that acquiring a new customer is five times more expensive than retaining a new one. Hence, it makes sense to look for ways to increase revenue from existing customers, and CLV helps you to find the effectiveness of your effort in this direction.
Conclusion
The metrics are a great way to uncover weaknesses & strengths, they give you a pulse over success or failure of your marketing strategies. In this blog, I have taken you through eight very important customer success metrics. To calculate these metrics, you will have to use customer experience management software. Now as we are talking about customer success metrics, this looks like a good time for me to introduce you to a relevant customer success solution. The first & the one which is sufficient in itself for calculating all metrics is WovVXM – a cloud-based, unified, lightweight, & powerful software from WovVTech – a business productivity software company. This software is available in the FREE-FOREVER model, which means you can use it for free without paying anything. Congratulations, as after reading this blog, you are most likely to become a customer success company.
