How does SaaS measure customer success?

While many SaaS companies spend countless hours perfecting their products and services, the most successful SaaS organizations give an equal amount of attention to the success of their customers.

So, since customers are at the center of everything you do, how do you measure customer success? Similarly, how do you empower customer success teams and equip them with the tools they need? One way is with customer success analytics ools, like the ones we provide at Planhat.

In this blog, we are going to explore topics like customer success metrics for SaaS companies, and really break down what customer success means in the SaaS industry.

What is Customer Success?

Customer success is providing advice, guidance, and support to your customers throughout their entire journey. For example, let’s say you are a customer success representative. A client may come to you and ask for help getting the most out of a certain feature or setting up their dashboard. They might ask for help to onboard members of their team with your platform. They may even look to you for guidance about whether they should upgrade their subscription to better suit their needs. All of these are common roles for customer success teams.

How to Measure Customer Success

To understand how to measure your customer success, you need to understand customer success criteria, also known as key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics. In large part, objectively measuring customer success comes down to the KPIs and metrics you use. Let’s take a deeper look.

What are KPIs in Customer Success?

Depending on who you ask, what you read, and what your needs are, you will get a different answer to questions like “What 3 metrics do you believe are the best measures of customer success?” Generally speaking , there are a handful of customer success KPIs that are helpful for everyone to think about. At Planhat, we emphasize a few of the following.

• Customer Satisfaction Score: Using a pretty straightforward customer survey, you can get a nominal score of how satisfied your customers are on average. What’s more, the feedback from these surveys can also provide insight into what your customers like, dislike, care about, or aren’t using as much. For example, check out our customer health features.

• Churn: Churn can be defined in a couple of ways, either as the percentage of customers who leave altogether, or the percentage who convert from high-value to lower-value customers. Both types of churn indicate something is going awry along the customer journey. Keeping an eye on both churn rates can help you understand exactly where the breakdown is, as well as inform future strategic decision making. At Planhat we help you monitor and prevent churn.

• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): Essentially, you want to see continuous increases (or at least no decreases) in your MRR. If the revenue you make each month goes down, it can be a good indicator that your customers are either not happy with the product, or not having success actually implementing it. Check out the customer intelligence and insights we provide here.

• Net Promoter Score (NPR): Similar to your customer satisfaction score, the NPR looks at customer surveys asking “how likely are you to recommend our product to someone else?” Clearly, the feedback and scores you get from this metric help inform how satisfied your customers are and how successful their use of the platform is. Answers like “It’s a complicated product to use” or “It was really easy to implement” can help guide the thinking of the whole company.

• Customer Support Tickets: The fact is, the more difficult your product is to use, the less likely a customer is to enjoy it and therefore stick with it. In some ways, customer support tickets are signs of shortcomings either in the product itself or the customer support experience. By using customer support tickets as a source of feedback and data, your CS team should look to take proactive measures on common issues or bugs.

Planhat…Powering Customer Success

With churn rates on the rise, customer success is a critical part of any business. It is truly impossible to overstate the importance of customer success as it relates to the overall health of a company. As such, it’s essential to equip your CS team with the right tools to be successful. That’s why at Planhat we have developed an all-in-one CS tool that is simple and easy to use. We provide the data, insights, and workflows to ensure your customers are set up for long-lasting relationships and long-term success. Sign up for a demo today to learn more.