What KPIs should I own and not own as the first customer success hire?

Technical Support response targets! We’ve all been there, and being the first Success Hire is super exciting. You get to wear many hats, get involved all the way through the customer lifecycle and be scrappy to get customers what they need. For us at the beginning, that meant taking on a lot of Technical Support tickets for our EMEA customers, especially in the morning before our then US-based tech support team was online. On the one hand, this gives you a lot of valuable product knowledge that can help you be an impactful CSM, but on the other hand, it can mask the business need to expand technical support teams and can hurt your focus in the long term. If you can, explain early the difference between CS and Tech support KPIs and ensure that anything you take on is temporary!

In stepping into the Customer Success domain, it's crucial to prioritize KPIs that align with the role's core responsibilities. A strategic approach involves mapping KPIs to the customer lifecycle stages, fostering a sense of purpose and confidence in your efforts.

For instance:

• NPS Over CSAT: While CSAT often leans towards support, NPS serves as a robust starting point, eventually evolving into a Customer Effort Score (CES) to gauge the efficacy of minimizing customer effort.

• Onboarding Success Rate: Measure the effectiveness of onboarding in delivering value, thereby nurturing customer confidence and satisfaction.

• Health Score and Adoption: Evaluate the overall health of customer relationships, considering both depth and breadth of engagement to ensure sustained success.

• Engagement Cadence: Tailor engagement frequency across various customer personas, fostering meaningful interactions at every touchpoint.

• Retention Monitoring: Continuously assess customer loyalty and satisfaction, providing insights into the overall customer experience.

Each KPI serves a distinct purpose: to analyze customer feedback, mitigate risks, and strategize ways to enhance the customer journey. While specific metrics like Expansions, Qualified Leads, and Net Revenue Retention (NRR) may not be initially owned, mastering foundational KPIs lays the groundwork for influencing these metrics.

Go Rock!

As the first CS hire at a startup, here's how I'd prioritize KPI ownership:

KPIs You Should Own:

1. Direct Customer Outcomes

• Onboarding completion rates

• Time to first value

• Basic product adoption metrics

• Meeting/QBR completion rates

• Customer engagement rates

2. Early Warning Metrics (Track these but your compensation should not be based on these metrics)

• At-risk customer identification

• Basic usage trends

• NPS

KPIs You Should NOT Own (Yet):

1. Revenue Metrics: These typically need more infrastructure and team support

• Net revenue retention

• Churn rate

• Expansion revenue

2. Advanced Product Analytics: Let product/data teams lead these initially

• Detailed feature adoption

• Complex usage patterns

• Custom health scoring

3. Scale Operations: Wait until you have more team members

• Response time SLAs

• Coverage ratios

• Team efficiency metrics

Key Considerations:

• Focus on establishing baseline metrics first

• Build manual processes before automation

• Keep metrics simple and actionable

• Document what you learn for future hires

• Partner with product/sales on shared metrics

As the first customer success hire I would suggest setting some OKRs (Objectives Key Results) around establishing the customer success function - documenting and defining key processes and playbooks along the customer lifecycle (Purchase, On-Boarding, Deployment, Adoption [use, consume], Renewals, Churn, Expansion) with a focus on the key moments that matter (sales handover, customer on boarding, customer launch, outcome and value realization, business reviews etc). 

I would suggest focusing first on the leading indicators (adoption and usage, time to first value, engagement) before looking at lagging indicators such as churn and NPS. 

Once the Customer Success function is established then start looking at KPIs such as Customer Retention Rate, GRR, NRR and CLTV.

Avoid metrics that are related to technical support or ones such as response times, number of interactions and time spent and these don’t get to the level of quality and effectiveness of the Customer Success role.

As the first customer success hire I would suggest setting some OKRs (Objectives Key Results) around establishing the customer success function - documenting and defining key processes and playbooks along the customer lifecycle (Purchase, On-Boarding, Deployment, Adoption [use, consume], Renewals, Churn, Expansion) with a focus on the key moments that matter (sales handover, customer on boarding, customer launch, outcome and value realization, business reviews etc). 

I would suggest focusing first on the leading indicators (adoption and usage, time to first value, engagement) before looking at lagging indicators such as churn and NPS. 

Once the Customer Success function is established then start looking at KPIs such as Customer Retention Rate, GRR, NRR and CLTV.

Avoid metrics that are related to technical support or ones such as response times, number of interactions and time spent and these don’t get to the level of quality and effectiveness of the Customer Success role.