Customer Success KPIs: Measuring Your CS Strategy

You spend a significant amount of money acquiring customers. But once they’ve converted, are you doing everything in your power to keep them coming back?

This is where Customer Success teams come in. Customer Success teams are tasked with establishing healthy relationships with customers, which in turn results in revenue for their organization. This requires building trusted, valued relationships with customers and delivering on the promise given during their initial investment. From that first touch, regardless of channel, a relationship begins to form. A positive experience with a brand or service can lead to upsell and cross-sell opportunities and reduce customer churn. 

It’s five times more costly to acquire new customers than retain existing ones. Customer Success teams help companies retain revenue from their existing base by assisting customers, driving product usage and engagement, and ensuring high levels of satisfaction. By overseeing and optimizing the customer experience, CS teams are focused on delivering value to customers and ensuring their success with the product or service. Furthermore, Customer Success teams work to expand existing engagements over time, driving more revenue from the base.

Common Challenges to Customer Success

Customer Success teams face a wide range of challenges. Effective communication, time management, scaling operations, retention, product knowledge, and expectation management are all critical components of a successful customer success strategy.

However, as businesses scale to create more digital touchpoints for customer conversion, one of the largest challenges Customer Success teams face is high customer-to-account-manager ratios. A single Customer Success Manager may have between 50 and 100 customer accounts, preventing them from giving every client adequate attention. As a result, Customer Success teams may prioritize a small percentage of high-value customers by delivering personalized touch points while relegating much larger swaths of lower-value customers to impersonal tech touches. As organizations bring on new customers, it becomes more difficult for Customer Success teams to scale their operations to meet the needs of their growing base. 

Despite the best efforts of Customer Success team members, there is often more work than hands, leading to inconsistent customer experiences. Ultimately, the number one reason for churn is a lack of customer engagement, which is directly related to the capacity issue facing Customer Success teams. 

Customer Success KPIs

Given the capacity challenges Customer Success teams face, identifying and measuring the strongest Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is critical in measuring the success of their ROI optimization initiatives. For Customer Success teams, there are six primary KPIs that truly measure success: 

1. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): This measures how satisfied your customers are with your product or service. It’s usually measured through surveys and can help you understand where you need to improve.
2. Net Promoter Score (NPS): This measures how likely your customers are to recommend your product or service to others. It’s a good indicator of how well you’re meeting their needs and how loyal they are to your brand.
3. Churn Rate: This measures the percentage of customers who stop using your product or service over a period of time. A high churn rate is an indicator of poor customer retention and can help you identify areas that need improvement.
4. Time to Resolution: This measures the time it takes to resolve a customer issue or problem. A longer time to resolution can indicate poor customer service or support.
5. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): This measures the total value a customer brings to your business over the course of their relationship with you. A higher CLV indicates that your customer success strategy is effective in retaining and growing your customer base.
6. Renewal Rate: This measures the percentage of customers who renew their contract or subscription with your business. A high renewal rate indicates that your customers are happy with your product or service and see value in continuing their relationship with you.

By monitoring these KPIs, it’s possible to identify areas where performance is not meeting expectations. This provides an opportunity to make changes and improvements to processes, systems, or strategies to improve Customer Success metrics. 

Powering Customer Success With AI Solutions

Fortunately, AI solutions like intelligent virtual assistants can reduce capacity burdens and scale customer engagement. These systems specialize in driving customer health, increasing retention, and finding expansion opportunities through conversational AI. 

For example, Conversica Revenue Digital Assistants™ for Customer Success offer seven skills with over 58 pre-built conversations to support customer engagement. AI-powered digital assistants can initiate contact, intelligently interpret replies, and craft tailored responses to engage customers at scale. They also close the loop by providing metrics on customer follow-up and response rates, so you can ensure every customer is receiving personal attention.

Unlike Customer Success platforms, Revenue Digital Assistants use AI to work autonomously, take action based on insights and initiate meaningful conversations with every customer.

Augmenting your Customer Success teams with AI solutions like Conversica Revenue Digital Assistants allows you to engage thousands of customers simultaneously through automated, yet personalized conversations. Scale your existing team with Revenue Digital Assistants and you will be able to:

• Initiate and manage hyper-personalized, two-way conversations with customers across email, website chat, or SMS text
• Encourage customers to fully utilize your products
• Remind customers to renew and identify those who need more attention
• Invite customers to key customer events, such as Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs)
• Gauge customer satisfaction and measure Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Conduct customer health checks
• Drive customer advocacy

By automating personalized communications at scale, customers are afforded more attention and consistency from the AI-powered assistant. Meanwhile, Customer Success Managers can offload repetitive tasks such as scheduling meetings and writing personalized emails, allowing them to focus on strategy, creative problem-solving, and building relationships with customers.

As this human/automation collaboration becomes the norm, customers will expect their needs to be met 24/7/365, and for the first time, businesses will be able respond to both urgent and less urgent needs without over-taxing Customer Success teams.