10 customer success metrics to increase delight and prove your team’s value

It’s hard to keep customers happy—and even harder to prove your team’s value to leadership—if you don’t have a clear picture of what’s working and what’s not with your website and product. 

That’s where customer success metrics come in. 

Think of them as your GPS that tells you if you’re on track and where to make changes that’ll keep users engaged and satisfied throughout their journey. Without consistently tracking these KPIs, you risk missing early churn signals and overlooking wins you could build on to drive retention and expansion revenue. 

In this article, we share 10 essential customer success KPIs, with real-world examples and practical tips to help you measure and optimize them effectively.

Key insights 

• Let your product type, customer profile, and growth stage guide which metrics you track. For example, if you run a SaaS product with long-term contracts, focus on metrics like adoption rate and renewal rate to see how engaged customers are and how well you’re retaining them.

• Pair sentiment-based metrics like NPS® and CSAT with hard numbers such as Net Revenue Retention (NRR) to get a complete picture of your customer success (CS) strategy’s performance and catch issues early. For example, if NPS® drops while NRR holds steady, it may signal satisfaction issues that haven’t yet impacted revenue.

• Connect every metric to a clear business outcome, such as revenue retention or cost savings from reduced support tickets, so stakeholders see the direct business value of CS efforts

10 core customer success metrics and KPIs to track

Hearing directly from customers is one of the most reliable ways to gauge how your CS strategy is performing. As Jenna Lindberg, Senior Director of Customer Success at Contentsquare, puts it:

While customer feedback is invaluable, it’s only half the picture. You also need to see how customers interact with your product.

Combining both insights gives you a clearer view of what’s working, what’s not, and why—so you can improve the customer experience, from onboarding through adoption and into long-term advocacy.

We’ve grouped the metrics into 3 categories, so you can choose what to prioritize based on your current goals:

• Customer success revenue KPIs: show how customer success impacts your overall revenue performance through retention, renewals, and expansions

• Account health KPIs: see which customers are thriving, which are at risk, and where to focus your retention efforts

• Customer experience KPIs: understand how customers feel about your product or service and how easy it is for them to achieve their goals

Let’s explore each in detail.

Customer success revenue KPIs 

Revenue KPIs track how much your company retains and earns from existing customers. They give your CS team hard proof to show how their work directly drives revenue. 

Let’s go over 3 metrics in this category. 

1. Net revenue retention (NRR)

Net revenue retention (NRR)—sometimes called net dollar retention (NDR)—tells you how much of your recurring revenue you’re keeping from your existing customers over a set period. It factors in: 

• Gains from upsells, cross-sells, renewals, and expansions

• Losses from downgrades and churn

An NRR above 100% means your existing customers are spending more, so your revenue grows even without acquiring new customers. In SaaS, that’s a strong signal to investors and executives that you have product–market fit and a CS strategy that’s working.

To calculate your NRR, use this formula: 

NRR (%) = [(Starting recurring revenue + Expansion revenue from existing customers − Revenue lost from downgrades and cancellations) ÷ Starting recurring revenue] × 100

💡 Pro tip: pair NRR with behavioral, performance, and error data—like rage clicks, recurring bugs, and excessive hovering—to spot friction points before they lead to churn. Contentsquare’s Data Connect automatically pulls this data directly into your warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, or Amazon Redshift), so you can analyze it alongside insights from your CRM and customer support tools to spot at-risk accounts and act early.

2. Gross revenue retention (GRR)

Gross revenue retention (GRR) shows the percentage of recurring revenue you’re keeping from your existing customers over a set period. Unlike NRR, GRR is purely the difference between your revenue from your current user base and the ones you’ve lost. 

A GRR above 90% indicates that most customers are staying on their current plans with minimal losses from downgrades, making it easier to predict future revenue. 

To calculate yours, use this formula: 

Gross revenue retention (%) = [(Starting recurring revenue − Revenue lost from downgrades and cancellations) ÷ Starting recurring revenue] × 100

Did you know? You can use Contentsquare to trigger an exit-intent survey right after a user cancels their subscription. The feedback can uncover friction points—like confusing onboarding, missing features, or poor support—that contribute to churn and lower GRR.

3. Customer retention cost (CRC)

Customer retention cost (CRC) measures the amount you spend to retain an existing user, including costs associated with salaries, customer success programs, marketing, and tools. 

Knowing your CRC tells you whether your retention strategy is working. While it’s almost always cheaper to keep a customer than to acquire a new one, that only holds if your retention costs don’t eat up the revenue those customers bring in.

Calculate exactly how much you currently spend on customer retention using this formula:

CRC = Total customer retention costs ÷ Number of customers retained

Then compare your CRC to average customer revenue and industry benchmarks to see if you need to adjust your strategy.

Account health customer success KPIs 

Account health KPIs measure the overall well-being of your customer accounts. They help you spot and address risks early before they affect your revenue. 

Let’s explore 4 of these metrics. 

4. Customer health score

A customer health score is a single value that sums up how healthy—or at risk—a customer’s relationship with your company is.

Think of it as a quick pulse check: a high score means the customer is satisfied, engaged, and likely to renew or even upgrade. A low score indicates frustration or disengagement, putting them at risk of churning.

There’s no single industry standard formula for calculating a customer health score—instead, it’s built from a blend of different quantitative and qualitative metrics, like:

• Sentiment data such as NPS® or CSAT

• The variety of features they engage with

• Contract renewals and upsells over time

• Daily active users (DAU) and monthly active users (MAU)

Did you know? Contentsquare lets you build dashboards that track all the signals shaping your customer health score in one place—from product usage metrics like conversion rates and returning user frequency to feedback scores like NPS® or CSAT. Then, dig deeper with Contentsquare’s Zone-based Heatmaps to uncover why those signals are declining, so you can act before your health score takes a hit.

A retention dashboard in Contentsquare—powered by Heap—highlighting DAU/MAU alongside weekly cohort retention trends

5. Product adoption rate

Product adoption rate shows the percentage of new users who start using your product regularly as part of their day-to-day work to get their jobs done. It looks at how often and how deeply they’re engaging with your product and its features.

While benchmarks vary by industry and product type, a healthy adoption rate sits between 40% and 60% and is even higher for consumer apps or niche B2B tools with very targeted onboarding. 

Here’s how to calculate your product adoption rate:

Product Adoption Rate = (New Monthly Active Users ÷ Total Signups) × 100

💡 Pro tip: if adoption is low, a lack of personalization could be the reason—users are more likely to stick around when the experience feels tailored to their needs and goals. Use Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool to see how customers move across touchpoints, which page elements or features they skip or struggle with, and why. Sonepar combined these insights with A/B testing to reposition its ‘Already Purchased’ feature so that returning customers could find it more easily. As a result, adoption grew 300% and active users rose 44%.

6. Customer engagement rate

Customer engagement rate shows how actively customers are interacting with your product over a set period. This typically includes how often they log in, how much time they spend in the product, which features they use, or how many key actions they complete.

To calculate your customer engagement rate, use this formula:

Customer engagement rate (%) = (Active Customers ÷ Total Customers) × 100

There’s no universal benchmark for a good customer engagement rate because it depends heavily on your product type and pricing mode.

A more reliable benchmark is your own historical data—track your engagement over time and focus on maintaining or improving it. If your rate dips, it’s a sign to investigate why customers are using the product less.

7. Customer churn rate

Customer churn rate measures the percentage of customers or revenue you lose in a given period because they cancel, don’t renew their subscription, or stop buying from you. 

Benchmarks vary by industry, but for SaaS businesses, a monthly churn rate under 2% is considered excellent. But once it goes over 5%, it means there’s a gap you need to fix. 

Calculate your churn rate using this formula:

Churn rate (%) = (Lost Customers ÷ Total Customers) × 100

For example, if you start January with 400 active customers and lose 40, your churn rate is (40 ÷ 400) × 100 = 10%, indicating a high churn rate.

Did you know? You can set up AI Alerts in Contentsquare to automatically flag page errors, performance issues, and frustration signals (like rage clicks, repeated taps, or drop-offs). Then you can watch replays of those sessions to see the problem through your customer’s eyes, and get quick AI summaries you can share with your team to fix issues faster and prevent churn. 

Contentsquare Sense AI alerts paired with session replays to uncover what happened in each user journey and why

CX customer success KPIs

Customer experience KPIs measure how customers feel about your product or service and how easily they can achieve their goals. They reveal whether customers are satisfied, loyal, and likely to recommend your product—and where to focus to improve their experience.

Let’s go over 3 metrics in this category. 

8. Net promoter score (NPS®)

Net Promoter® Score (NPS®) measures how willing your customers are to recommend your product or service to others. You can easily set up a survey in Contentsquare asking, “On a scale of 0–10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?” and analyze its results as seen below. 

Their answers put them into 3 categories:

• Promoters (9–10): your most loyal users who stick around and tell others about you

• Passives (7–8): generally happy customers but not enough to spread the word

• Detractors (0–6): unhappy customers who might leave or ask others to do the same

To calculate NPS®, use this formula:

An NPS® above 0 is good, 50+ is excellent, and 70+ is exceptional. According to our 2025 Digital Experience Benchmarks report, sites with NPS® scores averaging 77% kept visitors exploring for longer—on average, they saw 3 more page views per visit than others.

💡 Pro tip: ask an open-ended follow-up question in your NPS survey, like “What’s the main reason for your score?” to uncover what drives engagement or frustration. Because survey responses can be vague sometimes, pair them with behavioral data—just like Halfords did. The team used Contentsquare’s Session Replays to see exactly what customers did before leaving feedback, which helped them fix pain points and boost their NPS® by 2.4%.

9. Customer effort score (CES)

Customer Effort Score (CES) tracks how easy it is for customers to complete a task, like signing up, making a purchase, or getting help from support. The easier it is, the more likely they are to keep using your product.

Track CES by asking customers right after a key interaction to rate task ease on a scale of 1 (very difficult) to 7 (very easy). To get even more context into their experience, use Contentsquare’s User Tests tool to see how they actually interact with those features or page elements, and follow up with questions where necessary.

Contentsquare User Tests let you watch users complete tasks, gather feedback, and see if your product meets expectations.

💡 Pro tip: Contentsquare’s Error Analysis can help by flagging critical issues in real time and sending alerts straight to Slack or Microsoft Teams. You can watch the exact session to see what happened and open a Jira ticket directly from the session to get fixes prioritized.

Example of Contentsquare Error Analysis alerts sent directly to Slack

10. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) measures how satisfied customers are with a specific interaction, product, or overall experience. It’s usually gathered through a quick survey question, like “How satisfied were you with your experience today?”

To calculate your CSAT:

CSAT = (Number of satisfied customers (scores 4–5) ÷ Total responses) × 100

A score above 75% is considered strong for most industries. 

💡 Pro tip: the real value of CSAT comes from knowing why customers feel the way they do. When Royal Caribbean noticed lower satisfaction scores and higher drop-offs on mobile bookings, they turned to Contentsquare’s Heatmaps to find out why. 

The analysis showed that a large login banner was hiding the checkout fields, making it harder for guests to finish booking. After redesigning the banner, mobile conversions went up by 4% and satisfaction scores climbed noticeably.

How to choose the right metrics for your business 

Ultimately, the right customer success metrics to track depend on your product, your customers, and your company’s growth stage. 

Start by identifying the key metrics that best reflect customer health and directly impact retention and growth in your business. For example, a SaaS company with high churn might focus on product adoption, NPS®, and expansion revenue, while a service-based business might track CSAT and net revenue retention.

Once you’ve selected them, 

• Tie each metric to a clear business outcome like revenue protection, expansion, or cost savings from reduced support volume

• Set shared KPIs with other teams (sales, marketing, product) so everyone is working toward the same targets

• Create a dashboard to track these metrics using these steps

• Review performance together regularly and adjust your strategy as needed

Turn your customer success metrics into a roadmap for retention and expansion

Your customers’ priorities, challenges, and engagement with your product will keep evolving over time, which is why tracking KPIs should be an ongoing process. 

Pair those numbers with behavioral analytics data to see exactly how customers interacted with your product that resulted in those outcomes. 

With these insights, you can spot early signs of churn, uncover wins you can build on, and take targeted action to retain customers and grow their value over time. It also gives you concrete, outcome-based proof of the impact your team delivers—so you can clearly show the results customers achieve and how those results drive retention and expansion.

FAQs about customer success metrics