7 frequently used customer success metrics & how to measure them

Customers are equipped with multiple brand options in the market, which means if they are not satisfied

7 frequently used customer metrics & how to measure them

Customers are equipped with multiple brand options in the market, which means if they are not satisfied, they can opt for any of your competitors, simple as that! To make sure you retain maximum customers, you need to come up with powerful strategies. However, without any metric data in hand, formulating new strategies would be a loss of time and effort. For that, here we have listed the best customer success metrics for you to get a clear picture of your support team’s performance.

Here are the 7 frequently used customer success metrics & how to measure them:

1. Customer Satisfaction Score

A customer satisfaction rating is a key performance indicator that indicates whether a firm’s products or services are satisfactory to clients. At any point in your customer’s experience with your brand, you can collect feedback on how satisfied they are with your products and services.

You can obtain the score by asking some simple questions to your customer through a customer satisfaction survey to measure the client’s satisfaction with a product, service, transaction or interaction. The customers can choose from a range of options, including:

A numerical score from 1 to 10.
Verbal indicators include satisfied, unsatisfied, neutral, very satisfied, and very unsatisfied.
International symbols such as stars and smiley faces.

Whatever you choose, numbers, symbols or words, the scoring process will be the same.

How to calculate a customer satisfaction score?

You can calculate CSAT scores quite easily. Just add up all of the positive answers, divide by the number of people who took the survey, and multiply by 100.

The final percentage represents the proportion of customers who are pleased with their brand experience. A majority of people believe that five out of five and four out of five stars represent a successful outcome.

If 50 people rate your company a five and 30 rate it a four, the total number of people rating it a four or five is 80. Divide the total number of positive respondents by the total number of respondents to get a satisfaction rating of 0.8. Multiply this by 100 to obtain the percentage of satisfied customers versus unsatisfied customers. The result will be 80%, which is an excellent result.

2. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

A net promoter score is a KPI that allows you to measure the probability of your customers recommending your brand to others. NPS is a benchmark used by businesses to measure, evaluate and improve customer loyalty. NPS is different from other KPIs including customer satisfaction score and customer effort score. It measures the customer’s overall sentiments about the brand instead of just perception of a single interaction or purchase.

How to calculate the net promoter score?

Measuring the net promoter score is quite simple. This involves surveying your customers by asking them how likely they are to recommend your brand to a friend on a scale of 1-10. The responses can be categorized into three groups:

NPS detractors: This group of customers are the unhappy ones. They have answered your questions with 0-6, which means not only you are at risk of losing them but they could also share their bad experiences with other people hence, causing damage to your brand.
NPS passive: Customers who answered the question with 7-8 are hard to predict. They can either be promoters or could switch to your competitor’s brand.
NPS promoters:Customers who answered with 9-10 are the promoters of your brand. They are enthusiastic, and loyal customers who would recommend your brand to their friends and eventually bring new customers.

3. First Contact Resolution (FCR)

First contact resolution, also known as first call resolution or simply FCR is a performance metric used by companies to measure their customer service’s success rate in resolving customers’ queries during the first time they called without any need for a follow-up.

How to calculate the first call resolution rate?

To calculate the first call resolution rate of your company, you need to divide the total number of tickets resolved during the first call by the total number of cases received in a day.

FCR= Total number of resolved tickets/total number of cases in a day

For example, Let’s say a company named ‘A’ received 1,327 calls in January. Of those calls, 714 were resolved on the first contact. This would calculate a 53.8% FCR rate.

Company B received 798 calls in January and resolved 584 on the first contact. This amounts to a 73.2% FCR rate.

Company B resolved issues more efficiently than Company A, even though Company A resolved more calls.

4. Customer Churn Rate

Customer churn rate is the percentage of customers who are no longer using your company’s products or services. You can measure customer churn by dividing the number of customers you lost during a period by the number of customers you had at the beginning of the period. It is obvious for a company to expect a churn rate as close to 0% as possible. To achieve this, companies have to measure churn rates regularly to identify their failures and take every possible step to reduce them.

How to calculate customer churn rate?

Customer churn rate can be measured in the following three easy steps:

Step 1: Determine the time frame for which you want to measure your data. For example, a week, month, quarter, or year.

Step 2: Now identify how many existing customers you had at the beginning of the period as well as the number of churned customers during the timeframe.

Step 3: At last, divide the number of churned customers by the total number of existing customers at the start of the timeframe to find your churn rate.

For example, suppose X company had 1000 customers at the beginning of their time let’s say, 1st May. However, by the end of the month, 64 customers were churned. In this case, X company’s churn rate for the month of May would be 6.4% (64/1000=.064=6.4%).

5. Monthly Recurring Revenue

You can assess how much your customer base – or their spending – has increased since working with your business by looking at MRR. This metric provides the amount of money that your customers spend on your products and services every month. You can make this comparison over time to determine whether your customers are succeeding with your products.

How to calculate monthly recurring revenue?

Given the total number of active customers per month, you can simply multiply this number by the average revenue per user to calculate monthly recurring revenue. This will give you an idea of how much money you generate each month.

For example, if X company has 1,000 monthly active customers and its average revenue per customer is $750. Then X company’s monthly recurring revenue would be $750,000 ($1,000 x $750 = $750,000 MRR).

6. Customer lifetime value

A customer lifetime value (CLV) is one of the most crucial customer success metrics that you can quantify for your company. It reveals how much money a single customer will bring in over the life of their connection with your company. Companies can use CLV to estimate the value of their consumers over time. If their value rises, your firm knows that your products and services are contributing to customer success. If their value decreases, your organisation may want to reconsider its offerings or seek out problems with the customer experience.

How to calculate customer lifetime value?

CVL is calculated by comparing the customer’s revenue value to the number of the customer’s predicted lifespan. This can be measured in two easy steps:

Step 1: Multiply the average purchase value by the average purchase frequency rate.

Step 2: Take the acquired value and multiply it by your average customer lifespan. This way, you’ll get the estimated amount of revenue that customer is likely to spend on your business.

For example, an average customer spends $50 every time he visits Jane’s store. The customers visit her store about 3 times every month. Additionally, the average customer lifespan is typically two years before they stop purchasing from her store. From this we can determine that Jane’s CLV is $3,600 ($50 x 3 visits x 24 months=$3,600).

7. Qualitative customer feedback

Acquiring customers’ feedback is also an important metric to consider. Are people talking positively or negatively about your company and the service you provide? What do they like about their affiliation with the firm and what do they dislike? You should give your clients a chance to express their thoughts and offer suggestions. That way, you can build a long-term and meaningful connection. Customer success managers can learn a lot about their employees’ performance by reviewing feedback from clients in surveys. It may be difficult to discover where your onboarding or customer care process is falling short, but it’s critical to correct errors before a client leaves.

How to calculate qualitative customer feedback

You can collect customer feedback by sending out a survey. Send out a questionnaire to your customer base to determine how they feel about your customer support representatives.

Conclusion

Using customer success metrics & KPIs is the key to ensuring that customers’ needs are met through your services. It can be difficult to find the underlying reasons for the increased loss of customers. However, with systematic evaluation and measurement of data, companies can know where they are lacking behind and fill the gap.