GGR Blog - Why Customer Success Should Stop Treating MAU as the Key Renewal Metric in B2B SaaS

Heather Wendt

If you went to your annual check up and your doctor took your temparture and said 'see you next year', you would likely have some qualms about whether you could trust them to keep you in good health.

CSMs are often guilty of the same mentality. If we monitor MAU (Monthly Active Users), we have our finger on the pulse of our customers.

Unfortunately, just like with the medical scenario, that just isn't the case.

Debra Wilson shares 5 key areas that you need to be monitoring in addition to the MAU to ensure your understanding of where the customer is doesn't happen when they don't renew.

Take a moment to read this week's post, and share your thoughts on a single-metric health determination, and what you and your teams are doing to avoid getting tunnel vision!

Read the blog here

Ed Powers

To expand on that analogy, you also wouldn't trust your doctor if they felt your pulse and declared you healthy simply because they read somewhere that it was an important. Like a good doctor, we must apply scientific methods to diagnose a patient's condition before prescribing a remedy. And doctors know that what causes illness in one patient may not be the cause for another.

That's why there's no shortcut to doing your own work. Observe customer behaviors, generate hypotheses, test them analyzing data, and run experiments—constantly—to improve your results.

"Identify and study the activity and behaviors… Then, isolate the levers in your control that get them to take those actions." Well said!

Brandon Hemmelman

Its a good reminder on avoiding being single threaded- especially when measuring a customer's health. The challenge is finding the balance between signal and noise.

One metric that pulls its weight (and then some)- Depth of feature use (are they doing more than the basics?)

This metric can tell you how engrained your product is:

• Do super users exist?
• How many super users exist?
• What is the ratio of super users to "regular" users

You can use this metric to identify risk, organically grow usage, and find user champions/advocates.