When the customer success team at ilos was created, they tracked KPIs like emails sent.
Emails sent can be a great leading indicator, but founder Sean Higgins quickly learned there wasn’t a correlation between deals won and the number of emails sent by the customer success team.
So they ditched it and tried something else.
“You just need to start tracking, even if you don’t have the right metrics yet. Start tracking and you’ll gravitate toward the right metrics,” Sean told us.
Now his team focuses on churn: the percentage of customers lost last month.
“We live by that number,” he says. “We go to sleep thinking about how we can make that smaller.”
The lower your churn number, the better. Especially for companies in the software space, Sean recommends keeping the churn number below 5 percent. If your churn percentage is negative, you’re gaining more business than you’re losing.
Inversely, customer success teams can measure retention, where the higher your percentage, the better (a retention number above 100% means you’ve added more business than you lost).
But KPIs should always cater specifically to your team. If you start measuring something and find it doesn’t work, then try something else. Read more about how Sean made his team successful in our new Complete KPI Guide for Customer Success Teams.
To get you started on your own metrics journey, here are 15 customer success KPI ideas.
15 KPIs For Customer Success
- Opportunities Created
- Calls
- Retention
- Meetings
- Wins
- Emails Sent
- Churn
- Upsells
- Initiatives Completed
- New Contacts Added
- Add-Ons
- Scheduled Service Session
- Milestones Completed
- Cross-sells
- Renewals
Sean cautions against focusing too much on any one metric, because it can be easy to lose sight of what you’re doing as a whole. An industry best practice for choosing KPIs is to focus on 3-4.
Defining your team’s KPIs is just the first step. To learn how to align, calibrate and accelerate your team around them, secure your copy of our new guide below!
