Customer KPI Examples: Are Your Customers Happy?

5 min read

Are you actively working to attract and retain the right customers? Whether you are business to consumer or business to business, there’s an actual person who decides to buy your product or service - your customer. We’ve found that customers represent one of the 4 critical areas every company must actively work on to achieve success. There are a few things your company should do to cover your bases in this area, and it requires more than just training your employees to “talk with a smile." You need to identify your Core Customers and their specific needs as part of your overall business strategy; this will help you when making strategic decisions about products and services to develop (or kill), marketing messaging to attract the right prospects, and a Brand Promise Guarantee to help you close the deal.

Not only do you need to develop the right strategy for getting and keeping those valuable customers, but you also need to execute those customer attraction and retention strategies. Your execution plan might include developing a service vision, employee training or employee engagement programs (since customer happiness is closely linked to employee happiness), or rolling out a customer loyalty program. As part of your execution, you need a way to measure your success in your customer initiatives. Customer initiatives can be challenging because they often involve multiple departments, and your other important initiatives can compete for your team’s valuable time and energy. Just like any major initiative, you have to tackle customer initiatives in three key steps: develop your strategy, make an execution plan to get it done, and measure and adjust weekly.

Depending on your goal, you should choose 1-3 KPIs to help you measure your progress and make adjustments. Here are a few ideas for Customer KPIs to get you thinking about what the right metrics might be for your company.

8 Customer KPI Examples:

Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Customer Retention Rate
Customer Profitability Score
Customer Lifetime Value
Customer Turnover Rate
# of Customer Complaints
# of Customer Compliments
# of Customer Referrals

Stay focused on only a handful of metrics, and remember to measure only what you want to move. Your Customer KPIs should prompt you to take action when you aren’t hitting your numbers. And, it would be best if you strive for a mix of leading and results indicators. For example, if the result you are striving for is a "Customer Retention Rate" of 80%, that’s your result indicator. You should identify a leading indicator that lets you know if you’re on track to hit that result or not. Maybe a high “# of Customer Complaints” is a predictor that you are going to lose that customer. If you see that number going up, the team better take some action to save the account before your retention number takes a hit.

If you need help figuring out the right metrics to ensure success on your customer initiatives, check out our archived webinar, "3 Secrets to Dominate Your Industry With Great Customer Service” for a case study example.