AMA: Confluent Senior Director, Customer Success EMEA, Conor Holmes on Customer Success KPIs

As the first Customer Success hire, your job is to set the foundations for how the company measures impact, while focusing on what you can directly influence in the short term. What you own will depend on how mature the business is and how much customer data already exists. If you’re the only CS hire, it’s not realistic to take responsibility for overall renewal or expansion rates. Instead, focus on getting the customers you work with into a healthy, successful state. Good starting KPIs include: ...Read More

It can feel arbitrary when setting KPIs in new markets, and that’s okay. Whats necessary is to learn fast and iterate. When the market dynamics are unclear, use KPIs as a hypothesis, not a target. Start by borrowing directional benchmarks from similar markets, then identify what early signals might predict success, engagement, adoption, repeat usage, etc. Use cohort analysis to undertand how different profiles act and engage with the product. My would be: Analyse performance in comparable market ...Read More

We’d first map our OKRs to the company’s strategic priorities — for example, growth, efficiency, or product adoption — and ensure Customer Success directly contributes to those outcomes. That said, broadly speaking, CS OKRs tend to fall into three key buckets (but could be highly different depending on your how your company has deployed CS) 1. Retention & Growth GRR >95% NRR >120% Logo Retention >97% Gross Expansion Revenue >20% 2. Adoption & Customer Experience 100% of strat ...Read More

When attribution is hard, focus on cohort trends rather than one-off campaigns.It’s rarely a single asset that drives pipeline — it’s the combination of campaigns, customer touch points, and follow-ups that creates specific outcomes.I like to group customers into cohorts exposed to similar campaign types and then track their engagement or pipeline activity over time. That helps the team understand which motions are consistently working towards a PG or other metric, even when direct attribution i ...Read More

With a self-serve product, KPIs shift from relationship-driven engagement to product-driven insight. Since customer success plays out primarily through product experience rather than direct human touch, the focus moves to understanding how customers interact with and extract value from the product. You’re ultimately looking for high retention, expansion, and usage health in a paid subscription model — but the specific KPIs depend on your product’s value drivers. Typical metrics might include: Ac ...Read More

When the team is bandwidth-constrained, it’s critical to focus on a few high-impact output metrics rather than spreading effort across multiple inputs. I’d ask for accountability around a small set of measurable outcomes such as: Executed X customer engagement plans that delivered Y business impact Prevented X amount of churn through targeted retention actions Supported $X in expansion by driving defined customer engagements When very busy my approach would be to simplify focus, align effort to ...Read More