What are some KPIs that you find over-hyped and/or unimportant?

The importance of KPIs might vary from organization to organization and between the respective goals or objectives. It makes more sense to have continued or enhanced metrics than just focusing on the initial level of evaluating a particular KPI.

Usage / Number of Logins - It helps us delve into product adoption. However, it does not entirely reveal the depth and breadth of adoption. It definitely doesn't correlate with the business outcome. My suggestion is to depend on multiple measures, but the whole and sole represent adoption.

CSAT - Some organizations consider CSAT a critical metric, but in my opinion, CSAT helps us explore a particular resolution or service and doesn't add to the long-term value quadrant. How about measuring the impact and working through mitigation risks for the longer-term value and loyalty?

CES - Customer Effort Score helps us evaluate the effort minimized and is dedicated to that ONLY. How about you include a blend of experience/advocacy related to it? Combine NPS and CES for a broader context.

Ultimately, always define meaningful metrics or KPIs that align with the organization's goals, keeping in mind the long-term value, and sustain them.

it's important to distinguish between truly impactful customer success metrics and those that might be over-hyped or less relevant. Here are some specific customer success KPIs from my past experience that often fall into the latter category:

1. Number of Customer Meetings or Check-Ins

   • Why Over-Hyped: While staying in touch with customers is important, the number of meetings or check-ins doesn't necessarily equate to successful outcomes.

   • Better Focus: Quality of engagements and the tangible results from those interactions, such as path to achieving outcomes, value delivered or identified growth opportunities.

2. General Customer Satisfaction (Broad Surveys)

   • Why Over-Hyped: Broad satisfaction surveys can provide a general sense of customer feelings but often miss specific actionable insights.

   • Better Focus: Targeted feedback around key interactions or milestones (moments that matter), such as post-onboarding surveys or feedback after feature releases.

3. Activity-Based Metrics (e.g., Number of Health Checks Completed)

   • Why Over-Hyped: Simply tracking activities like health checks or business reviews doesn't measure their effectiveness or impact on the customer.

   • Better Focus: Outcomes from these activities, such as increased adoption rates, reduced churn, or identified cross-sell opportunities.

4. Number of Customer Success Plans Created

   • Why Over-Hyped: Creating a plan is only the first step; the real value is in execution and outcomes.

   • Better Focus: Progress and results from those plans, such as milestones achieved or goals met.

5. Product Feature Usage Metrics

   • Why Over-Hyped: Tracking the usage of specific product features without context can be misleading if those features aren't aligned with customer goals.

   • Better Focus: Alignment between product usage and customer success goals, measuring how particular features contribute to the customer’s business objectives and delivering value.

Metrics are only as valuable as the insights they provide and the actions they enable. For Customer Success to truly be effective, the focus should be on KPIs that measure meaningful outcomes and deliver actionable insights, rather than those that simply track activity or general sentiment.

By prioritizing quality over quantity and aligning metrics closely with strategic business goals, Customer Success teams can better drive long-term value and satisfaction for both customers and the company.

There was another question similar to this, so including my answer here:

I think the single worst KPI is 'customer touchpoints.' Customers don't want to be bothered unless you have information that is valuable to them that commands them to stop what they're doing and spend time with you. It's not enough to go about talking to every customer every month in a 'check-in.' It's much better to hold off for 3 months until you can have a value-driven conversation.

Additionally, I find certain CS SLAs to be sub-optimal KPIs. If CSMs are supposed to be proactive, that means they can't live in their inbox responding to customers. So if they have a KPI that dictates how quickly they should respond to customer outreaches, you're giving the team conflicting information on where they should be spending their time.