Using customer success analytics can be the difference between holding onto a major customer for years and losing them within the first few months.
What are the top customer success analytics your customer success team needs to track?
Churn Rate
Net Promoter Score
Customer Health Score
Monthly Recurring Revenue
Average Revenue Per User
Trial Conversion Rate
Customer Retention Rate
Average Days to Onboard
Product Usage
Average First Response
What is Customer Success?
Customer success is anticipating the questions or challenges your customers might have then offering answers and solutions proactively. This lets you enhance customer happiness and increase customer loyalty, boosting retention and revenue.
To make more informed customer success decisions, you can collect data from the various sources through which customers interact with your brand. Customer success software is often used to make this a seamless process. A few common types of data collected are as follows:
Product usage
Features used, login frequency, size of plan
Sales information
Internal notes on challenges and opportunities
Support notes
Number of help-desk tickets and average time to resolution
Customer feedback
Survey responses, CSAT data, product reviews
Financial information
Contract length, renewal schedule, current payment
CRM data
Life cycle stage, contact information, prior interactions
The software then converts this data into valuable insights that you can use to create better strategies for your sales, marketing, and product development efforts.
This enables you to offer more relevant experiences to your clients in all their interactions. Providing personalized experiences is what compels your customers to stay with your brand and become loyal clients.
Customer analytics help business-to-business software-as-a-service companies understand if they're meeting—or working toward—key growth metrics and milestones and continuing to grow and gain market share.
What is Customer Success Analytics
Customer Intelligence vs. Customer Success Analytics
Generally, customer intelligence is an attempt to use data to create insights (intelligence) about customers and can be used anywhere in the organization.
Customer success analytics is more specifically related to the common metrics and key performance indicators used in data-driven customer success, e.g., net churn, gross churn, net revenue retention, time to value.
Types of customer analytics
There are four categories of customer analytics you’ll want to monitor:
Diagnostic analytics
Uncovers why customers feel the way they do or behave a certain way. For example, “Why do clients avoid using our new feature?”
Descriptive analytics
Provides insight into the behavior of past clients. This is useful in identifying the root cause of issues and predicting future friction.
Prescriptive analytics
Attempts to answer the question “What should we do next?” Data often poses many questions; prescriptive analytics helps guide your future actions based on past and present data.
Predictive analytics
Uses past data to predict future customer behavior.
Within the categories there are ten primary analytics you’ll want to monitor.
Churn rate
Churn is the rate at which customers stop doing business with you over time. Churn rate is calculated by taking your monthly recurring revenue and dividing it by the revenue you lost for the month. Don’t include any upgrades or additional revenue from existing customers.
Net promoter score
NPS measures customers experience and can be used to measure customer loyalty. To calculate NPS, subtract the percentage of detractors who scored between 0 and 6 from the percentage of promoters that scored between 9 and 10.
Customer health score
Your customer health score helps you predict client behavior, which is key for preventing churn. The formula will vary depending on your business, but the following two questions are the main two you want to answer:
What are my customers currently experiencing? How can I improve this experience before they churn?
Average revenue per user
ARPU is useful for calculating your recurring revenue. To find this number, simply divide your monthly revenue by the number of customers for that month.
Monthly recurring revenue
Your MRR is your predicted monthly revenue for all your customers each month. To calculate your MRR, multiply your number of subscribers by the average revenue per user.
Trial conversion rate
To monitor how many users convert from a trial, divide the number of converted users by the number of trial users.
Customer retention rate
Your retention rate is the number of clients who stay with you after a period of time. To calculate this number use the formula below:
S = The existing customers at the starting period.
E = The total number of customers at the end of your measurement.
N = The number of new customers added between the start and the end.
[(E-N)/S] x 100 = CRR.
Average days to onboard
This metric can help identity problems in your onboarding process when this number becomes too high. You can calculate this number by adding the onboard days together and dividing that number by the amount of customers onboarded.
Product usage
Product usage helps determine how engaged a client is with your product. Low usage can indicate churn, while high usage can indicate a loyal customer or potential for upsells. This metric will be measured differently depending on the product. Try to answer these questions:
Is the customer engaging with the product more or less than others?
Has usage changed dramatically in a short period of time?
Does their usage exceed their plan? Do they need more from our product?
Average first response
Low first response times can cause friction between you and your customers, especially if they have an issue that needs solving. You can calculate your response time by adding all the first response times and dividing it by the number of tickets resolved.
If you want to help your B2B SaaS company keep heading in the right direction, you need to use customer analytics to build a customer experience that meets or exceeds your customers' expectations.
Customer Success Analytics scoring
There are a few different ways you can transform your customer success analytics into meaningful insights. Below are two popular methods businesses use to monitor their customer success proactively.
Customer health scores
You can use customer health scores in your customer analytics efforts. A customer health score is a metric customer success teams use to determine whether a customer is healthy and will remain loyal or is at risk for churn.
Customer health scores can also help you predict future events, including whether or not your customers will continue to subscribe to your services. This helps you determine what you need to do to mitigate any risks or make the most of future opportunities.
Net Promoter Score
In addition, you should monitor the net promoter score, a metric that measures customers’ loyalty to a company, to get insights about how satisfied your customers are. NPS helps you quickly address your customers' concerns and increase retention.
To calculate your NPS, simply add up the number of responses for each score and group those responses.
The group scores 9 or 10 are your loyal brand promoters who are great candidates for loyalty and referral programs. Scores 7 or 8 are passive responses; this group isn’t dissatisfied but could be vulnerable to a better offer. Lastly 0 through 6 are your detractors; this group is unhappy and at risk of churning or leaving negative reviews. Subtract your detractors from promoters to get your NPS.
"[Companies] with an eye toward the future are boosting their data and analytics capabilities and harnessing predictive insights to connect more closely with their customers, anticipate behaviors, and identify [customer experience] issues and opportunities in real time," according to McKinsey & Co.
How to use Customer Success Analytics
Benefits and best practices
How can Planhat help my company?
Planhat can help your company grow and become customer centered by reducing churn, increasing upsell/upgrades, and boosting visibility.
Planhat does this by integrating data from multiple systems into a flexible and powerful platform on top of which you can manage onboarding, renewals and other processes, collaborate and communicate with your customers, and visualize insights to everyone in your company.
Planhat pairs customer success analytics and customer intelligence methods (e.g., standard KPIs) to increase visibility (e.g., through advanced filters) and power action (e.g., through automations based on certain KPIs).
Why Planhat is the best option for your business
Planhat is the most powerful customer success platform on the market in terms of the depth and breadth of its features thus offering the flexibility and power to go after mission-critical use cases.
Customer success is a company-wide effort and as such Planhat has included unlimited users in all its plans, unlike other vendors. To start unlocking the potential of your customer data check out our free demo, or watch our webinar on how to identify and prevent churn.
Founder
Scaale.io
Jonas is the founder of Scaale.io, a growth partner for B2B tech companies, and brings over a decade of experience across brand, media, and marketing strategy. Previously Director of Brand & Communications at Planhat, he helped shape the company’s global narrative and positioning from the early days. Before that, he ran Make Your Mark, a Stockholm-based agency delivering strategic content for brands like Klarna, Volvo, and Vattenfall. Earlier in his career, Jonas served as Editor in Chief at Aller Media, where he led the digital transformation of Sweden’s iconic lifestyle brand Café.
