(888) 815-0802Two Customer Success Metrics You’ll Wish You Always Tracked
Winning customers is important. But if you’re selling SaaS or any offering with a subscription model, keeping current customers is often more important than acquiring new ones. According to Gartner, 80% of a company’s future profits come from 20% of their existing customers. So how successful are you at retaining your customers?
Here are a couple of customer success metrics from our Complete Guide to Inside Sales Analytics, along with some actionable tips you can use to boost retention.
Retention Rate
Key question answered
How successful are your retention/customer success efforts?
How to measure it
Calculate the percentage of customers that renew their contract.
Value
Tracking this metric over time enables managers to track the impact of customer success efforts.
Actionable Tip
Keep a close eye on this metric, because retention rates need to be high! According to research from Bessemer Ventures, top-performing cloud companies typically achieve annual customer renewal rates above 90%. If you haven’t already, consider creating a team of reps that are solely dedicated to your customers’ success.
Churn Rate
Key question answered
How satisfied are your customers overall?
How to measure it
Calculate the percentage of customers that choose not to renew their contracts. Try, if possible, to group your non-renewals by reason. Some common reasons that a customer might not renew a contract include:
- Choosing a competitor
- Going upstream to a more robust solution
- Going downstream to a less expensive solution
- Change in needs
- Dissatisfaction with your offering
Knowing why customers aren’t renewing contracts can help you develop a more effective retention strategy.
Value
This metric shows the inverse of your customer retention rate. It’s likewise important to see how many customers are not renewing contracts. Calculating churn rate helps you gauge how satisfied customers are. It can also help you discern which types of customers churn the least and most, which can help you determine your optimal target buyer profiles.
Actionable Tip
One of the best ways to prevent churn is to make sure that your current customers are sufficiently engaged by your customer success team. Just like you’d measure your sales reps’ activities, it’s likewise important to measure how many times reps are reaching out to current accounts via the phone, email or in-person meetings. Consider establishing SLAs for how often reps need to reach out to each customer.
