Different Customer Success Goals: Which One to Choose?

Nurturing customer relationships, assisting and educating customers during onboarding, pushing upsells and expansion…the list goes on and on. Still, these are just some of the responsibilities of the customer success team. 

By having a motivated and skilled CS team with defined goals, and the resources and tools to achieve them, you can improve customer satisfaction, retention, and, in the end, recurring revenue. 

Sounds great, right? If you wish to learn about different customer success goals are and how to define and set them, we suggest you stay with us. 

Goals Customer Success Managers Can Have

Customer success managers have many responsibilities. It is their role to ensure that each customer gets maximum value from your product and becomes and stays satisfied. 

As they act as advocates for both the customer and the company, they must always pick strategies that serve both parties. So, let’s see different customer success manager goals.

• Onboarding
  • Ensuring that each customer is onboarded properly and value realization is sped up as much as possible. 
• Customer retention
  • Improving customer retention and reducing churn by resolving customer issues proactively and ensuring satisfaction. Here is a guide on ways to reduce customer churn.
• Customer satisfaction
  • Enhancing customer satisfaction and improving overall customer experience. 
• Product usage and adoption
  • Encouraging customers to use the features that they can get the most value from.
• Upselling and cross-selling
  • Identifying upsell opportunities might be one of the most complex objectives of customer success. Customer success managers must identify and execute opportunities for upselling and cross-selling to existing or long-term customers at the right time with the right messaging. 
• Customer health
  • Monitoring customer health scores is one of the crucial OKRs (objectives & key results) in customer success as it helps in predicting and preventing customer churn and driving customer satisfaction. 
• Customer loyalty and advocacy
  • Turning happy customers into advocates who are willing to promote the product and contribute to positive word-of-mouth marketing is surely one of the most important customer success goals. 
• Customer feedback 
  • Collecting, analyzing and acting upon customer feedback can improve service and products, which makes it an essential OKR for customer success. 
• Training and education
  • Customer success teams and managers must create and provide customers with the resources that will equip them with knowledge for effective product usage. 

How to Define and Set Goals for Your Customer Success Team?

Objectives and key results or OKRs, are one of the most effective frameworks for setting and tracking customer success goals. To be able to set OKRs, you must first know which goals to focus on. 

Firstly, it is crucial to understand company goals and ensure that CS goals align with them. Whether you wish to focus on customer retention or revenue growth, it is vital to collaborate across teams and ensure that all team members are on the same page. 

It is important to set the right priorities as well. Focus on the areas that will have the biggest impact on customer success and business results. One of the most crucial aspects of customer success are its metrics. Identify key customer success metrics like customer retention, customer satisfaction, product adoption, etc., and monitor and track them regularly. 

Customer success teams are extremely valuable for SaaS companies, so make sure to keep them engaged by providing them with resources and training.

In order to have proper customer data use a customer success software like Akita, you can streamline all your customer data into a single hub and get to know each customer to the core. You can perform customer segmentation easily (it’s a no-code feature), see how each segment responds to a given customer success strategy, and share data across teams within seconds. 

Scheduling regular meetings to assess the progress and define adjustments as needed is recommended. Also, celebrating achievements regularly is a great motivation for CS teams. 

Important Metrics to Track 

Monitoring and tracking the right metrics is key to assessing the effectiveness of your customer success strategies and adjusting them based on precise customer data. 

• Customer retention metrics
  • Renewal rate, churn rate, and customer lifetime value.
• Customer satisfaction metrics
  • Net promoter score, customer satisfaction score, and customer effort score. 
• Customer health metrics
  • Customer health score and number of at-risk customers. 
• Product usage and adoption metrics
  • Feature adoption rate and usage frequency.
• Support and service metrics
  • Time to resolution, first response time, and ticket volume. 
• Revenue metrics
  • Annual recurring revenue (ARR), monthly recurring revenue (MRR), expansion revenue and revenue churn rate. 
• Engagement metrics
  • Engagement score and onboarding completion rate.
• Advocacy metrics
  • Referral rates, case studies and testimonials. 
• Feedback metrics
  • Feedback implementation rate and customer feedback volume. 

The data you get by monitoring these metrics can provide you with valuable insight into customer retention, satisfaction, churn, product usage and the overall customer experience. This is how you can make data-driven decisions to improve all the given areas and drive business growth. 

Customer Success Goals

The most important customer goal examples are tightly related to all the crucial customer success metrics we enlisted. So, let’s break them through:

Customer Retention Goals 

Customer retention is one of the most important aspects of customer success. The more success your customers achieve with the product, the greater their likelihood of sticking with it for longer. The essential metrics to track to assess customer retention efforts include:

• Customer retention rate 
  • The percentage of existing customers you managed to retain over a specific time frame.
• Customer churn rate
  • The percentage of customers who canceled their subscriptions. 
• Customer Lifetime Value
  • The expected revenue you’ll get from a customer during their entire relationship with your company.
• Customer retention cost 
  • The amount of financial investment needed to retain each customer.
• Renewal rate 
  • It measures the percentage of customers who renew their subscriptions at the end of the given period.

Revenue Goals

Revenue growth is certainly the ultimate goal of any company. In SaaS, recurring revenue is what keeps it alive, so tracking its crucial metrics is pivotal.

• Monthly Recurring Revenue
  • It measures the predictable revenue for each month.
• Annual Recurring Revenue 
  • It measures the predictable revenue within a year.

Product Usage Goals

A customer success manager is responsible for driving product adoption, and this is why tracking its metrics is the key to understanding the effectiveness of their customer success activities:

• Product adoption rate
  • It measures a product’s new feature adoption over a given time frame. 
• Daily active users (DAU)
  • DAU gives you insight into how often customers use your product. 

Customer Loyalty Goals

Customer loyalty is the greatest gift you can get since, from all those choices, the customer decided to stick to you and become not only a reliable source of revenue but also a customer advocate who truly loves your brand. Here are the metrics that help you assess customer loyalty:

• Net Promoter Score
  • It measures customer loyalty based on the simple question, “How likely are you to recommend a product/business to a colleague or a friend?”. 
• Customer Satisfaction Score
  • Like NPS, customer satisfaction score is based on customer feedback. It’s measured by the customer’s rating of their experience with your company or product. 

Best Practices for CS Goals

Beside the ones we already mentioned, there are a few other best practices for customer success goals that you can implement today to improve customer retention, loyalty, enaggeemnt and business growth. 

The first is to develop a clear action plan that outlines all the steps needed to achieve each objective. Also, nurture a customer-centric approach where you learn based on customer feedback. 

How Can Akita Help with Customer Success Goals?

Akita is a customer success platform designed to help SaaS companies create, manage and achieve their CS goals. Thanks to its features, customer success teams can improve customer retention. You can monitor customer health scores based on different metrics like usage data, survey responses, or support tickets. This is how you can identify at-risk customers and take steps to prevent churn. 

Thanks to Akita’s powerful customer segmentation tools, you can segment your customers based on their similar traits and then tailor a customer success strategy that fits each segment’s needs. 

Saving time and resources is crucial for any SaaS company, especially for startups. Akita allows you to automate routine tasks like onboarding processes, follow-up messaging, creating playbooks for different scenarios, and creating personalized dashboards.

Akita can integrate with various tools like CRM systems, product usage analytics, support ticketing systems, and other tools you already use. This is how you can centralize all your customer data and get a full overview of each customer. 

You can track renewals and automate them to reduce churn, but you can also identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities based on customer usage patterns, health scores, CSAT, and driving revenue.

Conclusion 

Customer success is one of the most important aspects of any SaaS company. 

With the numerous crucial responsibilities of customer success teams, it is imperative to have a clear set of realistic (or less realistic) customer success goals that align with your business objectives to be able to scale customer success and provide everyone with the best possible experience. 

In the end, nurturing meaningful customer relationships where both the customer and the company get the maximum value from each other is what truly matters in today’s oversaturated SaaS market. Make your customers feel valued and appreciated, and they will return it by being loyal and ready to spread a good word!