The real skill behind customer retention is helping customers achieve success. It would be great if you could rely directly on customer feedback to understand their satisfaction levels but more often than not these satisfaction surveys are lagging indicators. By then 50% of your customer base has already churned. Statistics reveal only 4% of unhappy customers actually bother to take up customer feedback surveys.
This essentially means 96% of your unhappy customers would not bother to let you know they’re unhappy. It is just easier for them to take their business elsewhere. Here, B2B SaaS analytics becomes important. Read on to know what the 7 data points that drive customer retention in SaaS are.
Pro tip: Why customer retention is important for B2B SaaS
7 Data points that will help you win over churn
Basic Telemetry
SaaS Customer behavior analytics is becoming increasingly an important metric across all industries to understand, engage and retain customers. The product telemetry data lets you know how your customers are interacting with your product, which features they are using and at what frequency. Even if you just capture and use ‘User Logins’ telemetry. It is very powerful since it is the easiest ‘leading indicator’ to set up your early warning system and drive customer retention.
Advanced Telemetry
It is the holy grail of setting up any real early warning system. Here we get to capture all key telemetry data points. You want to capture usage of all features that deliver value. Further, the focus here will be to capture both user and account usage. Users are always seen as a persona belonging to a specific account. Treating each user individually and ignoring the associated persona and account can only take you so far. Every feature click should be captured. Typically this can be from a few dozens to a few hundred data points to be captured.
Consumption Metric
If you have a plan or product where you have something consumable. Such as license utilization, APIs call, or resumes to be downloaded for an HR tech, or tests to be taken Edu Tech, or any usage limit on a certain product features, then you want to track the consumption since that will greatly affect both your customer retention probability and size of renewals. You can even consider product adoption to be a consumption target. And this will be your revenue line if you’re post-paid based on real consumption.
System Configuration
Systems can be configured to meet one’s use case and needs. Keeping a tab on what parts are activated and what are not, can greatly impact your b2b saas customer retention.
Customer Engagement
Simply put, how active is the relationship? By tracking the count and type of engagements you can know a lot about the relationship. So tracking every meeting, QBR (Quarterly business review), EBR (Executive business review), OBR (Onboarding business review), training session, onboarding session can be very effective if getting ahead of churn.
Support Tickets
Having the data of the number of support tickets raised and what frequency helps you monitor the health of the account. If a customer is raising support tickets means he is using your product. Monitoring the resolution rendered and satisfaction helps you gauge how engaged your customer is with your product. No support tickets are risk alerts indicating the customer is not deriving value from your product and the propensity to customer churn is very high.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net Promoter Score is a good metric, but keep in mind that this is a “lagging indicator” (not leading). While you should track it, do not solely rely on this for your early warning system. Having said, NPS is still an important metric to track since it provides great insights. What can make this even more interesting will be to see NPS not just at a product level, but also at an Account level. So essentially you’re calculating NPS for each of your customers with multiple users.
Now that you have this sorted how do you convert these data points into building the best early warning system for your CSMs. In fact, there are three kinds of early warning systems read more here.
Suggested Read: The ultimate guide to customer retention
P.S. – The main image has been taken from pexels.com
