This Customer Success Dashboard Helped Me Manage Over Dollar $50m In Customer Revenue

Customer Success can often be an overlooked function of your GTM team. What better way to combat that than communicating the work that your Customer Success team is doing than a dashboard? Our philosophy at LeanScale is that anyone in your organization should be able to have a clear understanding of what is going on with a customer by what is captured in your CRM. That view could slightly differ based on your customer success function and the specifics of your business, but let’s dive into the basics of a great first baseline version for a customer success dashboard within your CRM

Count of Customers [Number]

How many contracted customers does your organization have? There may be areas of segmentation on this depending on the business model you have. For example, if in a usage based company, do you have contracted or committed customers vs usage based customers?

Count of Churned Customers [Number]

How many churned customers have you had? This metric should be time based and at a minimum tracking year to-date count of churned customers. It could be two separate counts of churned customers this year and churned customers this quarter

Customers by Customer Stage [Bar]

Tracking a customer’s progression through on-boarding as well as overall adoption of your product or service is crucial to be able to illuminate the work of your customer success team. This may not be something you are capturing today, but something that should absolutely be implemented into your CRM at the account-level that is maintained by the CSM for that customer. Here are our LeanScale recommended basic customer lifecycle stages:

1. Pre-Onboarding
2. Onboarding
3. Implementation
4. Early Adoption
5. Mature Adoption

These stages should fit for most, but obviously can be adjusted for your own customer journey post-contracting. We would highly recommend defining clear entry and exit criteria for each of these stages just as you would staging for leads and sales opportunities. This will allow leaders to look at the dashboard and gain an understanding of where not only the customer base as a whole is currently in the designed journey, but also get granular in the source reporting with individual customers.

Customers by Customer Health [Pie]

Customer health is also a metric that is extremely important to track for each individual customer in your business. We recommend either using grade or color labels to identify the health of a customer. To the contrary of the customer lifecycle staging that has clear criteria for entry & exit, customer health does not have to necessarily be as scientific. As long as there is team and even organization wide alignment on how the field is defined then this will be an extremely useful segmentation of your customers. As a starting point, having customer success managers use it as a gut label before potentially moving to a more well-defined labeling is a win. It can create a clear window where churn risk may be within your base as well as where things like future references and case studies of your product & service can be sourced from.

Customers Managed by CSM [Bar/Stacked Bar]

How many customers are being managed by each customer success manager on the team? This is crucial for understanding the capacity of the team and gaining a better sense of where future customers should be assigned to balance the book of business for the team. I’d highly recommend taking this and stacking a chart by customer stage provides a view of how many customers are in each stage by CSM. This can be beneficial in an example of understanding how many customers are currently being onboarded by the CSM, which in most organizations is where most of the heavy customer success lifting is taking place.

Another good cut of this would be to stack the customers being managed by the customer success manager by customer health to highlight which customers are in poor health and could use an extra hand to get things trending in the right direction.

Renewals This Quarter [Number]

How many customers are up for renewal this quarter? Can also segment this by red or poor customer health to determine risk by dollar value or by a dollar value threshold to get a better understanding of how many high dollar customers are up for renewal during the current quarter.

List of Renewals This Quarter [List]

How many customers are up for renewal this quarter? Can also segment this by red or poor customer health to determine risk by dollar value or by a dollar value threshold to get a better understanding of how many high dollar customers are up for renewal during the current quarter.

Expansion Pipeline Created by Team & CSM [Number & Bar]

Highlight how many expansion opportunities & how much pipeline that the customer success team and each individual contributor has sourced year to-date or this current quarter. Even if your customer success team does not have it in their compensation plan to create and/or close upsell/expansion opportunities, it is a great way to put an ROI outside of retention metrics on the work that the team is doing through managing the base.

Activity & Most Recent Touch Metrics [List & Stacked Bar]

Activity and engagement with a customer is a direct tie to customer health and retention (essentially the top of funnel for customer success) so tracking this in your dashboard is a great insight. Creating a list view of customers that do not have a touch or any type of engagement within the month or the quarter can be invaluable for book reviews with the individual CSM. Another way to visualize this is having an axis be the customer success manager and stacking a bar chart of their customer count by the last time the customer had a touch or meeting so they can work from furthest back date to most recent date to ensure their entire base is being managed.

Summary

By taking the time to build a customer success dashboard, organizations can attain a clearer window into the performance of their customer success function and identify areas for improvement and growth.