Help! Which metrics should I use?

Tatyana Ventura

Hi, all,

I know this community will have the answers for me. Here some background: my company is moving from PLG and single user licenses towards customer growth and selling to Enterprise. We have just signed a hand full of Enterprise customers who are going through onboarding right now. I am tasked with defining the metrics we will be tracking to ensure renewal and expansion. Our Exec sponsors define their success as 1. how many of their reps using the tool and 2. the feedback they hear from the users about how impactful/valuable the tool is.
Our tool is a "vitamin", not a "pain killer" and has a rather steep learning curve.
So, my questions are:
1. Do I use NPS to measure feedback or some other metric?
2. Beyond tracking product usage, what other metrics would you recommend tracking?

Thank you all so much!

Tatyana.

Rick Emery

Hi, Tatyana ... this sounds like a fun problem to have!

Some quick thoughts:

• Since the learning curve is steep, consider defining the journey (typical Crawl -> Walk -> Jog -> Run) and measure percentage of users at each stage of the journey as well as time to progress between stages - this will give you a handle on adoption and highlight risk areas early
• With enterprise engagements it's important have regular conversations with users and understand the "what's next" ... especially their business initiatives that rely on your platform. Such "account plans" can be an indicator of engagement as well as a great tool for answering your second success metric.
• If you don't have bandwidth for that type of lift, consider building the planning into the app and rely on transactional surveys / feedback
• Finally for enterprise, you might find that a broader definition of Account Health (of which NPS can be a part) a better predictor of future behavior (cross- and up-sells)

Good luck!

Danny Orrick

Tatyana,
One thing I would suggest is determine how much bandwidth you and/or the team have to do analysis on the data and then present conclusions.  The challenge we face is that we gather a lot of information but how much are we really doing with it?  Sometimes its best to start with a small number of metrics that grow over time as interest in resources allow.  NPS is the most well known and discussed metric so I think there is definitely value in gathering it.  I would expect someone from your exec. team, a potential investor, board member etc to ask for the trend of the NPS because it is so well known. The more NPS data and trends you have the more prepared you are for those sorts of questions.  With the steep learning curve you described you might find a Customer Effort Score survey to be helpful - not only to track how customers are becoming more educated in the journey in your org but also and maybe more importantly how are you adjusting internally to the needs and trends you see from customers.  I do like the previous suggestion of Account Health Score as well.  The challenge there is that there is no standarizied metric so you will probably need to explain what and why you include in the Health Score.  Here's an article that might be helpful.  https://blog.upscope.io/health-score/.  We most closely reflect example 6 and it is helpful but  to my initial point we really need to spend more time on analysis than we do today to inform our decisions

Daryl Colborne

From more of a Customer Experience standpoint, I'm planning on tracking the following
1. CSAT (on Support tickets)
2. CES (after onboarding is complete)
3. NPS (when a customers experiences X% of utilization of our product)

Additional Metrics I am tracking by Segment and Overall Customer Base:
1. NRR
2. GRR
3. Logo Churn
4. Number of Leads Generated by CS
5. Percentage of Leads turning into "Closed Won" Opportunities

I think keeping it simple is very important. Getting bogged down in the numbers gets dangerous and can lead to analysis paralysis!

Mark Flanagan

I'm going to try this again,  Tatyana. Here's a post from process.st that I thought you'd find helpful: https://www.process.st/product-led-customer-success-metrics/?utm_source=newsletter_email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=none.