How to Set KPIs for Customer Success and Achieve Results? Key Points for Setting Goals

What is KPI setting for achieving results with Customer Success? Points for setting goals

Table of Contents

1. What are the KPIs to consider in customer success operations?
2. To achieve KPI
3. Skills Required for Customer Success
4. Summary

1. What are the KPIs to consider in customer success operations?

The main purpose of customer success is to guide customers to success and maintain a long-term relationship. Setting KPIs is crucial in achieving this goal. KPIs refer to specific performance indicators for daily activities to achieve goals. By setting KPIs, customer success can improve the quality of service.

Examples of Representative KPIs and Their Descriptions

The KPI for customer success needs to be set according to the features of the service or product, but some typical ones are as follows.

Cancellation Rate (Churn Rate): The cancellation rate refers to the percentage of customers who have cancelled their services while under contract. In businesses such as SaaS and subscription models, the cancellation rate is a crucial indicator and reducing it can lead to an increase in sales. It is considered an important strategy for customer success. The cancellation rate can be calculated by dividing the number of cancellations by the total number of customers and multiplying by 100.
Onboarding Completion Rate: Onboarding refers to the period from when a customer starts using a service until they become established. The onboarding completion rate is calculated by dividing the number of companies that have completed onboarding by the total number of companies in the onboarding period, multiplied by 100. Customers who have not completed onboarding tend to have a higher cancellation rate compared to those who have completed it, indicating a need for careful support.
Upsell/Cross-sell rate: Upselling refers to the act of persuading potential customers to switch to a higher-priced and superior product or service than the one they are currently considering or using. Cross-selling, on the other hand, involves encouraging customers in the same situation to purchase related products or services in addition to their initial purchase. A higher upsell/cross-sell rate can increase the average customer value and improve the lifetime value (LTV) in subscription-based businesses. However, there is also a risk of customers canceling their subscription if they do not see the expected results from the amount they paid. Therefore, successful upselling and cross-selling require a more comprehensive customer success approach.
NPS® (Net Promoter Score): NPS® stands for "Net Promoter Score" or "Net Promoter Ratio". It is an indicator used to quantify customer loyalty, and is typically calculated through survey responses. Customers are asked to rate their experience on a scale of 0 to 10, and are also given the opportunity to provide a reason for their rating. The results are then divided into three categories: critics (0-6), neutrals (7-8), and promoters (9-10). The difference between the percentage of promoters and critics is the NPS® score.
* NPS® is a registered trademark of Bain & Company, Fred Reichheld, and Satmetrix Systems.
Net Revenue Retention (NRR): An indicator that measures whether existing customers are able to maintain their sales compared to the previous year. If NRR exceeds 100%, it indicates that sales are expanding due to the effects of upselling and cross-selling.
CSAT (Customer Satisfaction): CSAT is an abbreviation for "Customer Satisfaction" and is an indicator that represents the satisfaction of customers who have used a product or service. Generally, data is collected through surveys such as "very satisfied", "satisfied", "average", "dissatisfied", and "very dissatisfied" on a 5-point scale, and this result is aggregated and quantified as a "CSAT score".

2. To achieve KPI

KPI is an indicator that evaluates the process leading to the final goal (KGI). Setting intermediate goals to achieve KGI is referred to as "setting KPIs". This allows for quantitative analysis of whether goals are being met and progress is being made. Properly setting KPIs enables consistent support and makes it easier to improve business based on analysis by establishing a system centered around KPIs. Such improvements lead to supporting customer success and improving customer satisfaction.
To achieve KPIs for customer success, it is important to pay attention to the following three points.

1. Think from the customer's perspective
2. Set measurable KPIs
3. Regularly review and consider KPIs

It is important to think from the customer's perspective and set appropriate KPIs for our own products and services. In addition, we will check whether we can set KPIs that will help us achieve our own KGI, rather than simply reusing KPIs set by other companies. Furthermore, it is important to establish a system that allows for collaboration with relevant departments and set KPIs that are easy to implement PDCA cycles.

Improving cancellation rates and increasing sales retention rates cannot be achieved by the Customer Success department alone, so it is also necessary to collaborate between departments in response to customer requests. Understanding customer needs and sharing them with other departments will lead customers to success.

In addition, we actively utilize tools for organizing and coordinating customer information. There are tools such as SFA (Sales Support System), inquiry management system, LTV management tool, and NPS measurement tool.

Furthermore, it is necessary to improve the quality of documents and manuals related to customer success.

Points to check before launching: "Setting performance goals for customer success activities"
What to do before creating an organization? "Promote it as a company-wide initiative"

3. Skills Required for Customer Success

The following are the skills that customer success should have in order to achieve KPIs.

Understanding of the Product and Literacy of Tools
It may seem obvious, but in order for customers to successfully use our services, it is necessary for the support team to have a deep understanding of the services as well. Additionally, Customer Success plays a role in receiving feedback from customers about the services. Without understanding the technical aspects of the product, it becomes difficult to communicate effectively with development. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, Customer Success will be using various tools. Without at least a basic level of literacy in these tools, efficient Customer Success tasks become challenging.
Building Relationships with Customers
The foundation of customer success lies in communication with customers, so business etiquette, social skills, and communication methods such as face-to-face, telephone, and email are essential. It is also necessary to accurately understand the other person's emotions and requests, and be able to provide appropriate responses and convey information. Experience is also necessary, but by building appropriate communication, you can establish a good relationship of trust and enhance the value of your products and services.
Problem Solving Ability
The Customer Success team will accompany customers on their journey to success by repeatedly solving the challenges and problems they face. Additionally, since customers may not always be aware of their own challenges, there may also be potential underlying issues that need to be addressed. It is the role of Customer Success to uncover and address all of these issues.
There are three key points to quickly resolving customer requests, issues, and complaints: – Problem Definition: Understand the problem the customer is facing and the desired outcome when the problem is resolved. – Cause Identification: Clearly identify the root cause (whether it is a product functionality issue, operational error, literacy issue, etc.). – Action Plan: Summarize the necessary steps to resolve the issue, such as reviewing documentation, training methods, or help information, or making product improvements. Using a service while still facing problems can be a major source of stress for customers. It can lead to mistrust in the service and even the risk of cancellation, so it is important to have the ability to quickly resolve issues on the spot.
Data Analysis
By conducting data analysis, we can derive accurate hypotheses and evidence, and use them as a basis for our approach. This can lead to a more systematic approach in the Customer Success department, and may even enable us to achieve Customer Success activities that are distinct from what we have done before. Furthermore, by utilizing Customer Success tools and analysis tools, we can conduct more accurate analysis from various perspectives, based on customer contract information and data from past cancellations.
Planning and Time/Resource Management
The ability to carry out long-term support is also required. We will plan and accompany customers in a planned manner along the customer journey, scheduling measures and actions at each point.
When providing support to multiple customers, self-management such as allocating resources and time and setting priorities is also necessary. It is also effective to use tools to visualize this.

Skills Required for Customer Success

4. Summary

Many BtoB companies (especially SaaS companies) have a high priority for customer success. The tasks of the customer success department are very diverse, but in order to set KPIs and achieve those goals, collaboration and cooperation with related departments, as well as streamlining of tasks, are necessary. Therefore, it is also necessary to establish support mechanisms (streamlining) and introduce various tools. With Human Science's services, you can implement measures that lead to the streamlining of customer success department tasks and the improvement of CX (customer experience).

Service Introduction

As mentioned in "How to Achieve KPIs," it is important to efficiently share information on know-how for customer success or to improve customer satisfaction. This also requires proper maintenance of documents and allocation of resources. However, creating manuals and training content to improve customer satisfaction requires a lot of personnel and time, making it a high priority and heavy workload task.
At Human Science, we offer many services for our customers in the Customer Success department. In particular, we believe that the quality of the content provided by the Customer Success department is the key to success. Therefore, it is necessary to improve and create manuals, FAQs, and training content. These tasks can be costly and the quality must also be easy to understand. At Human Science, we have a proven track record of creating easy-to-understand manuals and e-learning content. We offer the following services:

•Improvement of manual and training text quality
We propose the most suitable instruction manuals, technical documents, help, and FAQs for your environment. We provide consulting services from evaluating current manuals to creating a multilingual support system and building and operating a CMS. We can also handle the production of video manuals.

•Support for creating educational content and introducing LMS (Learning Management System)
Just like manuals, we will propose the most suitable educational content for your environment. Starting with evaluating your current content, we can also optimize LMS and provide multilingual support.

•Chatbot Implementation and Construction Support
To improve the efficiency of customer support, many companies are adopting chatbots. We will propose the most suitable chatbot for your environment. We can provide one-stop support from chatbot system implementation to content creation.

Achievements

The following are achievements for the Customer Success Department.

WingArc1st Inc.: Consulting and content creation services for the Customer Success department, including content evaluation and improvement consulting.
https://hs-learning.jp/case/wingarc1st/

We also offer services that can handle the creation of easy-to-understand "manuals" and "video manuals", as well as e-learning content, which are necessary for customer success, all in one stop. Please take advantage of them.