What Are The Top 15 SAAS Customer Success Metrics To Track In 2021?
How do you know whether your customers are enjoying the product they bought from you?
The best way to do this is through measuring customer success.
The majority of customers won’t seek you out to tell you how they feel about a product.
Instead, we can use how they interact with it to understand how valuable they find it.
For example, how long did it take them to get through the onboarding process? How many support tickets have they submitted to you in the last 6 months?
Gathering these insights and using them to help you improve your product is going to be the key to both your success and customer happiness.
Here are 15 SAAS metrics you can use to measure customer success.
Customer Feedback
1. Net Promoter Score
Calculating your Net Promoter Score, or NPS, is a relatively easy way to measure customer satisfaction.
To find your score, you start by asking a customer to rate how likely they are on a scale of 1-10 to recommend your product to someone else.
Depending on the score they give, these customers will be termed differently:
- Detractors = Those scoring you between 1 and 6
- Neutrals = Those scoring you between 7 and 8
- Promoters = Those scoring you between 9 and 10
The NPS score is then calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters.
I.e. if you have 60% Promoters and 10% Detractors you have an NPS score of 50.
How can you use this in measuring success?
It is in fact the easiest and most immediate way of discovering how happy your customer is with your product or service.
Having said that, it does have its drawbacks.
The main one of these is that the score you’re given is only a number between 1 and 10 without explanation.
There is not always the possibility to ask why a customer gives you a particular score and you don’t know how to put right what went wrong.
2. Customer Satisfaction Score
A Customer Satisfaction Score is just that.
It’s a score given by the customer as to how satisfied they are with the product.
To find out what it is, you ask your customer to rate the product on a score of 1-10, usually through a post-purchase survey.
You then take the sum of the scores and divide it by the number of participants in the survey and you then have an average.
What’s different between this and the NPS is that it gives you more detail about certain features of the product as opposed to just an overall score.
3. Qualitative Customer Feedback
How often do you ask customers for their feedback on your product?
It might sound like an obvious suggestion but it’s one that businesses often forget to do.
Some of the questions you might ask are:
- What they liked or didn’t like about the product
- What could have been easier to do
- Is there anything they feel is missing?
- Was anything difficult or confusing?
The answer to these questions is invaluable to improving your product.
It also helps customers to feel like not only do they have a voice, but you care about what they have to say.
While there is an argument that this type of feedback is too subjective to be useful as a SAAS metric, it can help you to identify any trends in what customers do and don’t like.
With Qualitative Customer Feedback, you also dig deeper into why they feel the way they do.
Onboarding
4. Onboarding Engagement Rates
Onboarding is possibly one of the most pivotal points in your relationship with a customer. It needs to go smoothly.
A negative onboarding experience can have customers asking for a refund before they even start, simply because they have lost trust in you and your product.
A strong onboarding process is important to guiding customers through your product and making sure they know exactly what they are doing with it.
You can measure Onboarding Engagement Rates by looking at a few things, such as:
- Are they using the tutorial you provided?
- Are they using all parts of the product?
- Did they reach out to you for support because they’re confused by what to do?
All of the above help to make your onboarding process better.
5. Time to First Value
This customer success metric helps you to further understand how successful your onboarding process is.
It measures the period of time between closing the sale and the customer completing their onboarding.
When this moment might be is up for discussion, but it is usually when they start to use the product itself as opposed to just learning about how it works.
Ultimately you want the Time to First Value to be as short as possible as this shows your onboarding process is smooth and efficient for the customer.
Number Of Daily & Monthly Users
6. DAU/MAU
DAU or MAU stands for Daily Active Users and Monthly Active Users.
This is another simple SAAS metric you can use in measuring success by tracking the amount of activity your customers are having with your product.
It shows you how many unique users are actively using your product during a particular amount of time.
You will have to define the parameters of what you consider to be an active user before you can begin.
Once you’ve done this, you can then track how many users you have over a particular timescale.
Ultimately the goal is to see this number increase over time.
If you notice a decline or a plateau, you can use this information to think about how you can improve the product to bring in more users.
Referrals And Retention
7. Number of Referrals
How many customer referrals are you getting?
This information is again a simple way of calculating customer happiness.
There’s no underestimating the importance of customer referrals.
Not only does it show that your current customers are satisfied with your product, but it also offers you a potential never-ending stream of new customers.
By measuring the Number of Referrals you get, you can then also see how many people actually recommended your product, as opposed to how many would consider doing so with NPS.
8. Retention Rate
You will always need to bring in new customers. That’s a given to your business success.
Returning customers, however, are the key to knowing that what you’re selling is as valuable as you think.
Only having one-time customers may be indicative of a wider problem with the product and can stop you from growing properly.
Keeping track of Retention Rate helps you to see how many customers are enjoying your product so much that they choose to stick around.
You can calculate this number by diving your active users by the number of total users across any given time frame.
9. Free-to-Paid Conversion
One way of bringing in customers is to first offer a free version of your product, with the aim of then upselling them on the paid version.
If you offer both free and paid versions of your product, keeping track of how many free customers are converting into paid customers is indicative of customer success.
Measuring conversion rate would look something like this.
If you have 50 users that converted from the free to the paid version in the last month, and you have 100 total users, your conversion rate is 50%.
A high conversion rate indicates that the product is valuable enough people are willing to pay for it.
What about a low conversion rate?
It might mean that your product is not coming across as valuable enough to customers that they want to pay for it.
It could even mean that you’re giving too much away. Your free product is so valuable that customers see no benefit in paying extra for what they already have.
10. Expansion Revenue
This looks at how much of your net revenue is coming from existing customers buying more products from you.
Examples of this may be upgrading their current product to a higher tier plan or paying for more people in their team to have access to the system.
This metric offers you an insight into how valuable customers are finding your product.
11. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
This measures how much revenue you expect a particular customer to generate within the course of their lifetime with your business.
It is incredibly important to measure this. It helps you to truly get a grasp on whether customers are finding success with your product.
If CLV is increasing, you’re doing something right.
If it’s not, you might need to take a deeper look at your product and ask yourself what you need to change.
Handling Customer Support
12. Number of Support Tickets Created
Again this is a really simple thing to measure.
What it does is help you understand how well customers are understanding your product.
For example, if you’ve recently been through an update and you receive an influx of tickets coming through, this might indicate there is something wrong.
On top of just tracking ticket numbers, you can also keep track of what the tickets are actually for and identifying any particular trends.
13. First Contact Resolution Rate
Customer service is so important in making sure you have happy, satisfied customers.
Taking too long to resolve a problem causes frustration and having to go back and forth to get the answers you need is key to dissatisfaction.
That’s why it’s important to measure the First Contact Resolution Rate. It tracks how many customer queries were resolved on their first interaction with support.
If this number is high, it suggests most issues are being resolved straight away and that your customer support team is working effectively. If the rate is lower, you need to understand why.
It might have a simple answer like the complexity of the problems that need resolving mean they cannot be resolved at first contact.
It might also suggest that you need improvements within your customer service team.
14. Average Time to Resolution
Following on from the above is looking at how long it takes for customer support to resolve a situation.
If it isn’t resolved at first touch, how much longer is it taking?
15. Net Customer Renewal Rate
As mentioned above, customer retention is indicative of whether or not they are enjoying your product.
Measuring the Net Customer Renewal Rate helps you to calculate the number of customers that are renewing their accounts as well as those upgrading or buying additional products.
Conclusion
Tracking these 15 SAAS metrics can help you to gain a deeper understanding of how valuable customers are finding your products.
They are, on the whole, easy to calculate and will provide you with information that you can use immediately in improving your product, onboarding process, the customer support you provide.
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