How do you evaluate customer success?

Where would any successful company be without its customers? The answer is simple, nowhere at all. Whether you are a brick-and-mortar store in a small town or a B2B SaaS company selling the most cutting-edge analytics platform, customers are at the core of every decision you make. At the beginning stages of your company, you had to focus on simply acquiring a customer base, and now, it is about maximizing the value of these customers.

A customer success (CS) team's sole focus is the lifecycle of customers, from onboarding to trouble ticket resolutions. Customer success analytics help CS teams get a better view of how well they are addressing the needs of each customer. So how can these teams accurately measure customer success? Through tracking specific key performance indicators (KPIs) and managing them with a collaborative dashboard.

What Are the KPIs for Customer Success?

SaaS companies, in particular, need to allocate extra time and resources to customer success as renewals and upsells are imperative to your business. If a customer feels like they are no longer getting what they need, they will churn and move on to the next SaaS company. To combat this, CS teams need to be able to know if they are on top of their customer's needs. Here are a few customer success metrics that any CS team needs to track to succeed.

• 1. Net Promoter Score (NPS): An NPS score is achieved through surveys you send out to current customers regarding how likely they are to recommend your product or service to someone. This data is actionable as it comes directly from those that use your services. To get the most out of these surveys, you might include a portion where customers can explain what they like and dislike about what you currently provide them. The information presented by customers can show you exactly what their pain points are.

• 2. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): A CLV score helps companies identify a reasonable range for the value they can expect to get out of a customer. This “value” is generally speaking to the monetary benefit the customer can bring to your company. This metric compares a customer's perceived value to their expected lifespan with your company. You can use formulas to determine both a customer's value and lifetime value.

  Customer Value = (Average Purchase Value * Average Number of Purchases).

  CLV = (Customer Value * Average Customer Lifespan).

• Churn Rates: Customer churn is an unavoidable aspect of running a business, but there is another way to look at this number, other than customers no longer using your services. SaaS companies will often have tiers for what they provide to customers. The highest and most expensive tier will typically contain the most features and support from your team. Monitoring the number of customers that continue to use your platform but downgrade to lower-tier can indicate that your services at the higher level don't match the price point attached to it.

• Customer Health Scores: This vital metric determines the likelihood that a customer will grow from their current standing with your company, stay consistent, or churn. Customer health scores are excellent when used in tandem with other KPIs. These will vary from company to company, which is why Planhat has created a Health Score Laboratory. Our customizable tool allows your team to tweak any of the parameters around a customer's score so you can make actionable decisions from the data. For a more in-depth analysis of this subject, check out a post from our CEO Kaveh Rostampor.

The best formula a CS team can follow is to track as many relevant KPIs as possible and keep a watchful eye on them to see how the progress changes each quarter. You should also be monitoring customers and creating touchpoints when it gets close to their renewal time. This will give your team the best chance at improving on processes that are lacking and hurting the team's overall performance.

Using a Customer Success Dashboard

Identifying the right metrics and KPIs for your organization to track is only part of the formula to evaluate your overall customer success. It is vital to have a way to manage this data and communicate with customers about their experiences. This is where a customer success dashboard comes into play.

Planhat has spent years crafting our platform to become the nerve center of your customer operations. What a platform like Planhat can do for your customer success strategy is fitting all of your vital customer data under one unified view.

Planhat: The Modern Customer Success Platform

Our team built our platform around the idea that customer success teams need the appropriate tools in order to shine like the rockstars they are. Our system enables your team to build a robust customer strategy by creating proactive journeys from acquisition to retention.

To learn more about the Planhat effect, contact us today!

Say goodbye to feeling frustrated! Here at Planhat, we bring all of your customer data together in one place with an actionable, accessible, and secure 360 view. Our beautiful, flexible, and powerful customer success platform gives you tools for data collection, workflow, automation and integration, and presentation building all in one place. Sign up for a free demo and start redefining how you can grow and collaborate with your customers.