A business without customers isn’t really a business at all. And a business without satisfied, loyal customers operates in a precarious position. When uncertainty around customer satisfaction or outcomes begins swirling, it puts company leaders and customer success teams in a tricky position. After all, how can you improve what you don’t fully understand—in this case, customer relationships?
In this blog, we’re taking a look at customer success metrics and analytics. How do you measure customer success? What metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) should customer success managers be tracking, and how can you apply analytics to uncover deep insights into the customer journey (and how to improve it)?
Keep reading for an overview of what to measure and how to apply customer success analytics to turn raw data into actionable insights.
How to measure Customer Success
Customer success attempts to measure how satisfied customers are, as well as how likely they are to become loyal customers over time. Here, it’s worth distinguishing between customer service and customer success:
Customer Service
Receives and responds to customer outreach—questions they have, issues or problems they encounter, and so on. Think product and technical support. Customer service is largely transactional, so a satisfied customer is one whose question or issue is resolved efficiently and effectively.
Customer Success
Takes a broader and more strategic role. Customer success teams work to better understand how customers are engaging with the product or service, creating satisfied customers by proactively understanding and addressing issues that might hinder retention efforts. Customer success works to optimize the entire customer journey—when they do their job well, they create loyal customers and prevent costly churn.
How do you quantify customer success? It starts with defining and tracking the right metrics.
What are the key Customer Success metrics?
A few of the most common customer success metrics examples include the following:
Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)
Calculated by dividing a period’s total revenue by the total number of users or subscribers over that period. This provides insight into the value of individual customer relationships—and of cultivating loyalty (in the form of renewals, for example).
Customer Churn Rate
Churn rate is the percentage of customers who have discontinued their relationship with your business—obviously, the lower the better. It can be calculated by simply dividing the number of customers you lost (over a given period, such as a month or quarter) by the total number of customers. This is a vital customer success KPI for SaaS companies, since converting a new customer can cost 5x as much as retaining an existing customer.
Customer Retention Cost (CRC)
Customer retention is a direct measurement of customer loyalty, and CRC quantifies how much it costs to retain an existing customer. CRC is calculated by dividing the total amount spent by customer success to support retention efforts by the number of total customers. Some of the factors that might be relevant include engagement programs and resources, customer onboarding and training costs, marketing spend, and so on.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS is widely considered one of the most important customer success metrics, and it’s a very simple measurement. Customers or subscribers are asked to answer one simple question, “How likely are you to recommend [brand] to a friend or colleague?” Customers answer from 0 (not at all likely) to 10 (extremely likely). Based on their response, they fall into one of three categories: promoters (9-10), passives (7-8), and detractors (0-6). The idea is to maximize promoters and minimize detractors. Especially when companies follow up with customer responses, they can gain timely insights to prevent further churn.
Net Revenue Retention (NRR)
This metric quantifies changes in net revenue which is the #1 priority for company growth and valuation (learn more about it in our blogpost about the future of customer platforms). NRR can be a little tricky to calculate, but here’s a basic formula:
1: Add together your monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and customer upgrades (dollar amount).
2: Subtract the dollar value of any downgrades or customer churn.
3: Divide that total by the original MRR figure, and multiply the resulting outcome by 100 (to result in a percentage).
Tracking these key customer success metrics provides a foundation for improving the customer journey, a sizable step toward mitigating churn and improving retention, cross- and up-sells, and the likelihood of gaining new customers through referrals. Once the right KPIs for customer success have been identified, leaders can create a customer success scorecard to assess individual interactions and outcomes or a customer success KPI dashboard to increase visibility and accountability team-wide.
What are Customer Success analytics?
The easiest way to differentiate between customer service metrics and analytics is to define the purpose of each. Customer success metrics are measurements of key performance indicators. Tracking specific metrics results in raw data, and customer success analytics refers to the process of deriving actionable insights from that data. Customer analytics involves evaluating the customer experience and journey—to better understand the “how” and “why” of improving key performance metrics.
What are the benefits of customer analytics?
What Analytics Are Important for Customer Success?
Planhat provides a single source of truth you can act on
Planhat offers a better way forward, with an all-in-one customer success and data platform to collect all relevant customer and account data in one place—a 360-degree customer view, in other words. Planhat’s platform is also much more than this, offering a diverse feature set to power your customer success analytics, including:
Usage analytics and customer health score
Track and visualize how customers are using your product/service, benchmark usage trends, and alert team members when things change. Create your own customer health scoring methods, and experiment with variations based on customer segmentation or other factors.
Customer journey management and optimization
Optimize the customer onboarding process by creating customer playbooks to design clear, repeatable processes and clear milestones for each stage of the customer lifecycle.
Customer portals and centralized interactions
Keep customer conversations centralized with a customer success inbox and track product issues and feature requests throughout the customer lifecycle.
Management reporting and team performance
Build custom dashboards to track customer journeys, measure CSM efficiency, and keep everyone in the know. View team performance as a whole or break it down by individual team members.
Task management and automations
Make it easier for customer success teams to develop personalized and lasting relationships with customers with our task management system. Keep everyone in the loop on customer actions and communication, configure real-time alerts to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks, and set up automations to let team members know when they need to reach out.
When you review the list of features and functions above, keep in mind that Planhat is unique in that we’ve collected all of these (and more) in a single platform. Not only is it comprehensive, but it also makes accessing and understanding data easy, with data security you can count on. With Planhat’s innovative tools for CSMs, data isn’t just accurate and reliable, it leads to actionable insights.
Learn More About Planhat
We’ve really only scratched the surface of what all Planhat can do for your customer success team and organization as a whole. Learn more about our complete customer success toolkit and schedule a demo today.
Enterprise Account Executive
Planhat
Doa is a top-performing SaaS sales leader with over 15 years of experience spanning enterprise sales, customer success, and revenue operations. At Planhat, she most recently served as an Enterprise Account Executive—ranked #1 globally in her category for 2024—driving standout results and consistent performance. Prior to Planhat, Doa led customer success and key account teams at Meltwater and held multiple roles at JPMorgan Chase, where she developed deep operational and commercial acumen. She brings sharp execution, cross-functional fluency, and a relentless focus on delivering value to global customers.
