The old playbook for customer success is no longer enough to keep customers happy and coming back. A whole new school of thought is emerging. It’s one that focuses less on making as many calls or closing as many tickets as possible, and more on developing, maintaining, and strengthening customer relationships .
And this means measuring success is changing, too. Here are some customer success metrics that will be more important than ever this year and in the years to come.
☛ Customer Success Metrics ☚
►1. Customer health score
This may sound obvious, but hear me out: You have to look ig database at the bigger picture, beyond individual tickets and emails. Are customers really seeing the value in your product or service?
How often does your customer use the product? How successful is your customer after purchasing your product?
Customer support is no longer about getting someone to sign on the dotted line, setting up new service, and answering your emails and calls. Instead, reps need to make sure your customers not only survive but thrive after the purchase. They need to follow up with customers, offer assistance with issues, and help them proactively strategize for the future.
As Forrester’s Kate Leggett points out in a blog post, customer success is the driving force behind growing existing revenue and influencing new sales. One customer's success may prompt someone else to try your product or service in hopes of achieving a similarly successful outcome...but this virtuous cycle only happens when you actively encourage and track customer success.
How to calculate the customer health score
To measure customer success, come up with a customer “health” score. What are your finances like? How many customers do you have? Monitor the health of your business as it relates to your product, then monitor the metric over time.
You can develop a customer health score by compiling all of these factors and using an index as the actual scoring metric to keep things consistent and easy to track.
You can also measure the growth of your clients
After all, the best sign of business success is growth. Ask if the company is hiring, taking on more business, or improving customer retention rates to get a qualitative sense of how successful a customer is becoming.
►2. Net Promoter Score
Customer satisfaction isn’t just about the customer’s feelings toward the support rep, but also your feelings toward the brand and product itself. When you measure customer satisfaction, you’re determining how happy your customers are when they interact with your business. It should come as no surprise to you that customers who are happier with their experience are more likely to make repeat purchases.
One of the most popular ways to measure customer satisfaction is through a Net Promoter Score. A Net Promoter Score, or NPS®, simply asks if someone is likely to recommend your business to someone else. The rep and their relationship with the customer play a big role in this rating because they’re likely the person the customer has interacted with most frequently.
The benefit of an NPS is that it provides both quantitative and qualitative data about your customers. Not only does it ask participants to rate their experience on a numerical scale, but it also asks them to provide an explanation for their score. That way, your business can analyze feedback based on scores and then examine customer experiences if you find abnormal or atypical results.
How to Measure Net Promoter Score
Measuring NPS is relatively easy. You just need access to a form tool that can generate a rating scale response.
Your eNPS survey form should only ask one question: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product or service?” Then, add an open-ended section below it and ask participants to explain their rating.