Whether you run a B2B or B2C company, delivering excellent customer service goes far beyond keeping response times within a promised service-level agreement (SLA).
Your team may resolve tickets quickly, but failing to monitor customer success metrics may cause you to miss frustrated or unsatisfied customers.
A customer service team is considered effective when it can create a positive customer experience. This can inspire customer loyalty, whether the product or service is expensive or not, resulting in long-term growth.
This is why businesses are increasingly focusing on customer success metrics. In fact, 88% of customer success leaders agree that effective customer success efforts can reduce churn rate. This further shows how important it is to track the right customer success metrics.
Image via Vitally
In this in-depth guide, we’ll discuss 15 key customer success metrics and how to track them. With visibility into customer success metrics, you can identify where your team’s efforts are thriving and where customers may disengage.
Customer success metrics are key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflect how well a business is supporting its customers to get the full value of a product or service.
They track the effectiveness of customer service and support teams. At the same time, they measure overall customer happiness, which could clearly indicate whether customers will continue to patronize a brand and recommend it to others.
Businesses that track customer success metrics can enjoy the following benefits:
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Here are 15 customer success metrics that your business should start tracking today:
Customers don’t want to go through a lot just to get a simple issue resolved. Think about being transferred from one support agent to another, having to explain your problem from the very beginning each time.
So, how do you know whether customers are making a high effort to get what they want? That’s where a customer effort score comes in. It allows you to evaluate whether customers are finding it easy to resolve an issue with support or use a product feature.
A low-effort customer experience can lead to happier, more loyal customers. But high-effort interactions increase the risk of losing your customers to another brand.
This makes customer effort score one of the most vital customer success metrics to monitor, especially since it reflects the quality of the entire customer journey.
You can track CES through a post-interaction survey asking customers to rate the ease of their experience on a numerical or agreement scale (e.g., “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”). The results are averaged to create a score.
Image via Zonka Feedback
Businesses that measure CES gain a clearer understanding of how operational efficiency impacts customer satisfaction and retention.
If you find that you have a high CES, you can reduce it by proactively guiding customers through onboarding and removing unnecessary steps from common workflows.
Consider investing in intuitive self-service options or using a shared inbox to improve email response times for inquiries.
This is the percentage of customer support inquiries that your team resolves during the first interaction, removing the need for follow-up messages or calls.
It’s among the top customer success metrics that show how efficiently a customer support team can meet customer needs. It also determines if your workflows are designed to deliver quick, effective solutions.
First contact resolution rate is calculated by dividing the number of cases resolved in the first contact by the total number of cases, then multiplying the result by 100.
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Depending on the communication channels your customer service team uses, you can track the first contact resolution rate across platforms. It helps you see where customers experience fast resolutions or delayed responses.
First contact resolution rate is closely linked to customer satisfaction score, customer effort score, and the entire customer experience.
When the team resolves issues on the first try, customers will be more satisfied. This can improve loyalty and reduce the likelihood of switching to another brand.
On the other hand, when customers contact your company repeatedly over the same issue, it could frustrate them. This can also increase the workload of your customer support team.
This means customer-facing teams should receive adequate training. They should have access to the right knowledge bases to respond to customers without escalating to another agent.
Also, if email is your primary communication channel, you can invest in an email analytics tool like timetoreply that offers live inbox alerts. This can help you assign customers to the most competent and available support agent.
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This is one of the most widely used customer success metrics that directly measures customer satisfaction after an interaction or experience.
It provides immediate feedback on whether a customer’s needs were met. This makes it a critical indicator of customer happiness and the effectiveness of your customer-facing teams.
Like other customer success metrics, you can track your customer satisfaction score by sending a short survey after a purchase or support interaction. Customers will rate their satisfaction on a simple scale, such as 1 to 5.
Calculate the score by dividing the number of positive responses by the total number of responses, then multiplying by 100.
Image via Simplesat
Customer success teams can pair CSAT surveys with qualitative customer feedback to capture not just the score, but the reasons behind it.
A consistently high customer satisfaction score indicates that your customer support team and customer success managers are effectively addressing customer needs.
In contrast, a low or declining score can be an early warning that customers are unhappy. This implies that there are gaps in your customer success strategy or friction in the customer experience.
Your customer success team can improve CSAT by focusing on boosting first contact resolution rates and creating more personalized support interactions. They should also consider sending follow-up emails after resolving customers’ issues.
When you acquire a new customer, you want to know how long it takes them to realize the promised value of your product or service. This is what time to value (TTV) measures.
It’s among the most critical customer success metrics because the faster customers achieve meaningful results, the more likely they are to engage with your brand and become loyal customers.
If it’s taking a long time for customers to see how your product helps them, they can stop using it and even request a refund. Dissatisfied customers might even leave negative feedback on social media.
Before tracking TTV, you must define what “value” means for your customers. This could be completing onboarding, reaching the first successful use case, or achieving a specific outcome tied to a product.
Measure the time from the moment a customer signs up or purchases until that milestone is reached.
You can monitor this in your customer success metrics dashboard, alongside customer health score and renewal rate, so you can identify accounts that need extra attention.
Also, your team can offer tailored training sessions, how-to videos, and quick tips to simplify onboarding and setup. They should also provide quick responses to customer queries, concerns, and problems to improve customer success metrics.
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Commonly seen among SaaS companies, this metric helps determine whether customers are actively using and finding value in products or services.
It combines other customer success KPIs like usage and renewal history, customer satisfaction score, and average email response time.
Unlike other customer success metrics, there’s no specific formula for measuring customer health score. You must define which inputs matter most to your business.
SaaS companies, for example, use metrics like:
Assign a score to each metric based on its impact on the overall customer health score. Then, display the result in a customer success metrics dashboard with color labels, such as shown below.
Image via UserGuiding
A healthy score signals loyal customers who are more likely to renew, increase average purchase value, and even advocate for your product.
This will also help you identify which customers might be receptive to upselling opportunities, such as upgrading to a higher-tier subscription.
A declining customer health score, however, reveals customers at risk of churn. Identifying this early enables you to take measures to make them happy.
These include regular check-ins and personalized training to ensure customers are fully realizing the value of the product.
As one of the most critical customer success metrics, net promoter score measures the likelihood of customers recommending your product or service to others. Why is this so important?
The net promoter score serves as an early sign of growth potential and customer churn risk. A high score indicates that customers are satisfied and willing to become advocates.
This means they’ll get involved in word-of-mouth marketing, recommending you to everyone they know. This way, you can get organic marketing at zero cost.
And if you’re lucky enough to have a social media influencer in this category, there’s a high chance of reaching a wider audience and attracting potential customers.
Conversely, a low NPS means that most customers have a negative perception of your brand. It could be due to delayed email responses, poor product performance, or a slow website, which could also negatively impact other customer success metrics.
Usually, companies send a single-question survey asking customers, “How likely are you to recommend our brand to family and friends on a scale of 0 to 10?”
Based on their answers, respondents are then grouped into three categories:
To calculate your net promoter score (NPS), simply subtract the percentage of detractors from that of promoters.
Many customer success teams now go a step further and use a two-part net promoter score (NPS) survey. It provides space for customers to give additional feedback.
This qualitative data is invaluable, helping you understand the reasons for a customer’s happiness or dissatisfaction.
Image via InMoment
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Customer retention is a business’s practice of going beyond the initial sale to build lasting relationships, ensuring customers find continuous value in your product or service.
This keeps customers coming back rather than leaving you for a competitor. You need to know the percentage of customers who stay with your business, so you’ll know what you may be doing wrong (or right).
That’s why you need to track customer success metrics like customer retention rate. It measures the percentage of customers who stayed with you over a specific period.
Companies can measure their customer retention rate annually, quarterly, or monthly. However, SaaS companies with a fluctuating user base may need to do it daily.
Here’s how to calculate customer retention rate: get the number of customers at the end of a period, then subtract the number of new customers that joined within that period.
Divide that figure by the total number of customers you started with. Then, multiply by 100 to get the percentage.
Image via Blend Commerce
A high customer retention rate means only good things for your business. For starters, it reduces the need to spend heavily on acquiring new customers, which can be more costly than keeping existing ones.
As a result, it lowers your average customer retention cost and increases customer lifetime value.
However, maintaining a high customer retention rate requires coordinated effort across customer-facing teams. This involves using an email response management software to optimize reply time and ensure email productivity across teams.
You also need to consistently measure your customer satisfaction score, act on customer feedback, and offer personalized customer experiences.
This is one of the critical financial customer success metrics for SaaS companies because it directly reflects whether customers value the product or service or not.
Customer renewal rate shows the percentage of customers who choose to renew their contract or subscription at the end of a term.
High renewal rates mean that your product is useful to the customer beyond the first purchase.
On the other hand, low renewal rates are a sign of churn, which can lead to a decrease in revenue.
It’s important to track customer renewal rate, as it allows you to forecast monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and assess customer lifetime value (CLV). With these estimates, you can plan business growth strategies with confidence.
Here’s how to calculate your customer renewal rate: divide the number of customers who renewed by the total number of customers up for renewal, then multiply by 100.
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To encourage renewals, engage with customers before their subscription expires, making sure they’re fully taking advantage of the product or service.
For example, your customer success team can review the benefits customers have gained from the product or service against their initial goals or expectations. This will help them see that the product or service is delivering value as promised.
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The customer churn rate tracks the percentage of customers who stop doing business with your company within a specific period.
It’s the opposite of customer retention rate and one of the most closely monitored customer success metrics. That’s because even a small increase in churn can impact recurring revenue, especially for subscription-based businesses.
Additionally, customer churn rate can identify any weaknesses in your customer support team. Those who maintain a healthy customer relationship will likely have the lowest customer churn rate.
High churn usually means customers aren’t seeing the value they expected, which increases customer acquisition cost and reduces average customer lifetime value (CLV).
Conversely, keeping churn low means you’re retaining existing customers, allowing you to maintain steady monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and grow profitably.
To calculate churn rate, divide the number of customers lost during a period by the number of customers at the start of that period, then multiply by 100.
Image via Amplitude
SaaS businesses may calculate churn to understand its financial impact, especially when customers downgrade or reduce their spend without fully leaving.
However, it’s better to track customer churn rate alongside other customer success metrics like net promoter score (NPS) and customer health score. This will give you a clearer picture of why customers are leaving.
Your team can reduce churn by improving first contact resolution rates to avoid customers getting frustrated. You can also use email reporting software like timetoreply to monitor the performance of individual agents.
It allows you to track important customer success KPIs like average response time per agent. Some agents require an unusually high number of back-and-forth emails to resolve an issue.
Identifying this issue ensures you provide adequate training to improve their efficiency and email communication skills.
This customer success metric measures the total revenue you can expect from one customer over the entirety of their relationship with your business.
It shows how much a customer has spent on your products and services.
You’ll need three factors to calculate customer lifetime value: average purchase value, average purchase frequency, and average customer lifespan. The formula looks like this:
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Imagine a customer buys a single cup of coffee for $5. They may never return to your store, perhaps because it’s not on their regular route or they simply prefer another place. The CLV of this customer is just $5.
Now, what if a customer loves your coffee and keeps coming back, spending $20 a month for one year? Their CLV is $240 ($20 x 12 months).
This simple comparison shows that a single purchase has limited value, but a long-term, loyal customer is far more valuable to your business.
Before you can accurately track customer lifetime value, you need reliable data on customer transactions, repeat purchases, and churned customers.
Customer lifetime value is among the top customer success metrics to monitor because it directly links customer relationships to revenue. A higher CLV means customers are staying longer, making repeat purchases, and delivering more average revenue per user.
A low CLV, on the other hand, signals that customers aren’t fully realizing the value of the product or service.
It also helps you determine how much you can spend on new customer acquisition or retention without suffering any losses.
You can improve your CLV by offering additional value through helpful resources, loyalty programs, or product updates.
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While it’s viewed as a sales and marketing metric, customer acquisition cost is among the top customer success metrics. It provides context for the business’s health and profitability.
It measures the average cost required to gain a new customer. This includes sales, marketing, and onboarding costs associated with turning prospects into paying customers.
Monitoring customer acquisition cost helps you figure out how much you can invest without incurring losses. More importantly, it’s best understood when tracked alongside your customer lifetime value (CLV).
If your CAC is higher than your CLV, it means you’re losing money on every new customer you acquire. It’s also a sign that your business model isn’t sustainable.
So, you either reduce the acquisition cost or focus on retaining existing customers to increase long-term value.
The formula for calculating customer acquisition cost is the total sales and marketing expenses divided by the number of new customers.
Image via Wiser Notify
Improving your customer acquisition cost requires collaborative effort. It begins with marketing and sales teams targeting. You should prioritize acquiring customers with higher potential lifetime value.
Once ideal customers have been onboarded, your customer success managers can then ensure that new customers quickly realize the product’s value.
This strategic alignment reduces the time it takes to see a return on investment (ROI) from your acquisition costs.
SaaS companies charge a monthly fee instead of a one-time product license fee. As a result, monthly recurring revenue (MRR) has become one of the most valuable customer success metrics they track.
It monitors the revenue your business generates from active customers in one month. It’s also a reflection of your customer retention rate and growth opportunities through upgrades and repeat purchases.
You can calculate your monthly recurring revenue by multiplying the number of paying customers by the average revenue per user (ARPU).
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Let’s say an email analytics software company has 500 active users per month, and the average revenue per customer is $200. Its monthly recurring revenue will be $10,000 (500 x $200).
You can also break down your monthly recurring revenue into other components, such as MRR from new customers, upsells and cross-sells, and those lost from cancellations (churned MRR).
A steady increase in MRR signals strong customer loyalty, effective customer success efforts, and a healthy balance between new customer acquisition and customer retention.
On the contrary, a declining MRR may point to rising churn or missed opportunities to expand customer accounts.
Hence, customer success managers should focus on retaining customers for longer periods and maximizing account value.
They can also create structured success plans that highlight new features, encourage product adoption, and identify opportunities for upselling.
Customer support teams can also contribute by maintaining a high customer satisfaction score and customer effort score, reducing the risk of churned customers.
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While the monthly recurring revenue is an aggregate number, the average revenue per user is a per-customer metric.
It calculates the average revenue you generated from each active customer over a specific period, usually monthly or annually.
As one of the top customer success metrics, the average revenue per user reveals your high-value customers and least spenders. It also helps you evaluate whether your customer success strategy is driving engagement and conversion.
You can’t track MRR without ARPU because both of these customer success metrics provide an in-depth understanding of growth trends.
For example, if MRR is increasing but ARPU is flat, it indicates that only a few customers are driving growth.
The formula to calculate average revenue per user is straightforward. You’ll get the total revenue within a period and divide it by the number of active customers in that period.
Image via Growth Mentor
An increasing ARPU is also a sign that customers are gaining value from your product or service. Otherwise, they’ll cancel their subscriptions or downgrade to lower-tier plans.
Your team members can stop this from happening by nurturing customer relationships. For example, they can create personalized account reviews, introduce value-added features, and recommend upgrades that align with the customer’s needs.
Your customer service team should also ensure quick resolution and maintain a high customer satisfaction score. This strategy encourages customers to keep using the product, preventing churn.
Unlike customer success metrics like CSAT and NPS that provide a numerical score, qualitative customer feedback captures the insights, opinions, and experiences customers share in their own words.
This type of feedback reveals the “why” behind customer sentiment and provides richer context for customer success metrics.
There are many ways to gain qualitative customer feedback, including surveys, support tickets, interviews, and social media interactions.
Companies that actively measure customer success with qualitative insights can adapt faster, prevent churn, and enhance customer satisfaction.
That’s because customer feedback reveals opportunities for improving your product and areas where you need to optimize your customer success strategy.
You don’t actually need a formula to track qualitative customer feedback. It’s about collecting and analyzing open-ended responses to pinpoint recurring themes.
For example, you can send a survey asking, “What’s the one thing we could do better?” After analyzing 50 responses, you notice that:
You now have three specific, actionable themes to address. But gathering data isn’t enough. Customer success managers must hold regular check-ins to act on the feedback, showing customers that their opinions matter.
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As customers submit tickets, you shouldn’t only aim to provide first contact resolution but also make sense of the trends. It begins with tracking the volume, type, and frequency of customer inquiries over time.
This will help you discover recurring issues and friction in the customer journey. It can also show whether your customer service team provides the required assistance in a way that’s easy for customers to understand.
Analyzing patterns in support tickets can help you identify opportunities to improve both the product and the customer experience. However, unlike other customer success metrics, support ticket patterns don’t have a specific formula.
Simply categorize tickets based on issue type to figure out what specific problems or issues are causing customers to contact support.
You can also compare the support ticket patterns against your customer satisfaction score and customer effort score to identify the root cause of customer dissatisfaction.
For example, a high number of tickets about a particular bug or confusing feature might correlate with a low CSAT and a high CES.
Rather than just reacting to negative feedback, critically analyzing customer support metrics can help you address real customer problems.
Here are some strategies for reducing recurring ticket issues:
1. What are customer success metrics?
Customer success metrics help evaluate how effectively a business helps customers achieve their goals with a product or service. They capture customer satisfaction, retention, loyalty, and long-term value.
Tracking these indicators helps you strengthen customer relationships and reduce churn. It also ensures measurable outcomes for your customer success strategy.
2. Are customer success metrics and KPIs the same?
Customer success metrics are measurable data points that provide insight into the customer journey.
Customer success KPIs, on the other hand, are the strategic metrics that directly reflect progress toward a key business goal.
Assuming your goal is to increase sales, expansion revenue can be your customer success KPI, as it directly measures growth from your existing customer base.
To track this, you’ll need to monitor customer success metrics like customer health score and product usage to find which customers are ready for an upsell.
In a nutshell, all KPIs are metrics. But not all customer support metrics are KPIs.
3. What are key customer success metrics?
The top customer success metrics you should track include:
4. What are customer success metrics for SaaS companies?
The essential customer success metrics for SaaS companies are those that help them measure customer success, forecast revenue, and ensure existing customers gain value from subscriptions. They include the following:
5. What is the customer success manager scorecard?
The customer success manager (CSM) scorecard is a tool that tracks customer success KPIs linked to a manager’s performance. It may include retention rate, customer health scores, renewal revenue, upsell success, and satisfaction scores.
The scorecard helps ensure customer success managers are accountable for customer success efforts and measurable outcomes.
6. What are the four main KPIs in customer service?
Customer service KPIs highlight the support team’s ability to handle inquiries and effectively contribute to overall customer satisfaction. The four main KPIs are:
7. What are the 5 pillars of customer success?
The five pillars of customer success are onboarding, product adoption, customer support, relationship management, and value realization.
Together, these pillars guide how customer success teams deliver measurable outcomes.
Aligning your customer success metrics with these pillars can improve customer relationships, retain existing customers, and increase customer lifetime value.
8. How do you handle difficult customers?
Handling difficult customers requires patience, empathy, and problem-solving skills. Customer-facing teams should listen actively, acknowledge the customer’s concern, and provide clear, respectful responses.
They can also reduce frustration by resolving issues quickly and following up, ensuring customers feel heard and valued.
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There you have it — the most important customer success metrics you should start tracking today. These measurements tell the story of how well your business is helping customers meet their goals.
From satisfaction scores to customer lifetime value, customer success metrics give you clarity to create and nurture customer relationships as well as drive long-term business growth.
If email is your primary support channel, tools like timetoreply make it easier to track and improve your customer success metrics.
With its email analytics and reporting, timetoreply helps customer service teams improve reply times, increase response rates, and see at a glance which emails are still awaiting a reply.
Are you ready to see your customer success efforts pay off? Book a demo now to see exactly how timetoreply fits your business needs.
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Head of Customer Success @ timetoreply
Barry Blassoples is the Head of Customer Success at timetoreply, where he helps customer-facing teams boost revenue and protect brand reputation by providing actionable insights to improve their business email response times. He has over 15 years of leadership experience across customer success, sales, and marketing roles in high-growth tech companies.
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