Customer Success to Accelerate Your Business Growth

When it comes to companies with recurring business models, customer success is clearly driven by the services they provide and by giving customers a strong incentive to continue using them. 

This means your customer success team can play a key role in driving revenue and growth.

This article explains how you can use revenue data to create meaningful customer success metrics. We also share tips on using the data you collect to increase revenue and scale your business.

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Customer Satisfaction Equals Revenue

Customer success teams that focus only on responding to customer service requests often end up playing the same role as customer support. They simply respond to inquiries instead of actively looking for ways to improve the business’s financial performance.

They often have to work with incomplete data that lacks detail and/or is outdated. All of this means that a major growth opportunity goes overlooked.

What Customer Success Teams Should Really Do

Customer success teams should sit between sales and customer support. That means their core activities should include ensuring product or solution usage, success planning, driving adoption, monitoring customer health, retention, upselling, and cross-selling.

However, many customer success teams focus on onboarding, health monitoring, and retention. They overlook activities that drive expansion, which depend on—or are improved by—revenue data.

Creating Customer Success Metrics From Revenue Data

There are six key customer success metrics you can measure using revenue data:

1. Customer lifetime value (CLV or CLTV)






2. Churn rate






3. Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) expansion






4. Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) reactivation






5. Average revenue per unit (ARPU)






6. Customer retention costs

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV or CLTV)

Customer lifetime value is the revenue you expect to generate from customers for as long as they use your services or purchase your products. It effectively translates the impact of all customer-focused efforts into a single metric. CLV shows the financial value of nurturing customer relationships and therefore provides guidance on how much you can spend to retain each account.

Churn Rate

Churn rate can go by several names, including attrition rate, customer loss rate, or churn rate. However, they all refer to how much business you have lost, whether in terms of customers and/or revenue. 

Revenue churn generally includes plan downgrades as well as complete service cancellations.

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) Expansion

MRR expansion refers to your success in generating additional revenue. Common ways to do this include:

• Adding more users






• Purchasing additional services






• Upgrading a plan






• Purchasing additional products

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) Reactivation

MRR reactivation measures your success in winning back lost business. Every time you achieve a reactivation, you should analyze the reasons behind it. If you successfully achieve high reactivation MRR, there are likely opportunities to actively target customers who have churned. You could also target your competitors’ customers.

Average Revenue per Unit (ARPU)

This is the average amount a single customer generates for a business during a given period, usually one month. ARPU is calculated by dividing total revenue in a given period by the average number of customers during that same period. It is important for activities such as segmentation, understanding user personas, A/B price testing, and your overall expansion strategy.

Customer Retention Costs

Just as acquiring new customers costs money, retaining and growing existing customers can also cost money. Once you know these costs, you can budget for them properly.

How Customer Success Should Use Metrics to Increase Revenue

Collecting data is great, but it only has value if you use it. Here are seven steps you can take to turn your business intelligence into revenue.

Act vs. React

Customer success teams should focus on analyzing data and proactively engaging with customers, encouraging them to address problems they may not have realized they had. They can only do this when they can leverage a strong data strategy. Customer success teams should not limit themselves to reacting to issues raised by customers; those issues should go to customer support.

Implementing Personalized Offboarding

Implement a system to understand why customers leave. Then use this information to guide your win-back and churn prevention strategies. You could supplement this automation with human outreach for your highest-value customers. Ideally, you would do this by phone to provide a truly personal touch.

Improving Segmentation

Effective customer success depends on effective customer segmentation. You can base this on MRR, revenue potential, lifecycle stage, and churn risk. 

Your customer success team must be able to identify four key customer groups: VIPs, core customers, non-core customers, and high-potential customers. In general, you should focus your resources on VIPs and high-potential customers. VIPs bring the most value to your business. High-potential customers could increase their value to your business. You should keep core customers satisfied. You should also try to acquire as many of them as possible. Non-core customers should generally require only a small percentage of your resources.

Using Automation for Upselling and Cross-Selling

When done correctly, automation can be a highly effective way to upsell and cross-sell. Essentially, you need to monitor customer activity and match it to your offering. For example, if you notice that a customer regularly performs an activity manually, send them an email explaining that they could simplify the process by automating it. You should tailor this email to their specific use case so it feels personalized.

Using Automation to Combat Churn

There are multiple ways to leverage automation to combat both voluntary and involuntary churn. Since much of involuntary churn results from failed payments, implementing smart payment recovery (payment retries) makes sense. Measures to prevent voluntary churn include:

• Optimizing onboarding to ensure adoption






• Implementing lifecycle tracking and automated outreach by stage






• Creating personalized offboarding playbooks to win back lost customers

Building and Improving Metrics Dashboards

Give your customer success team access to key account data in an easy-to-read format. Regardless of the tool you use (BI tool, customer success platform, etc.), it is extremely important for your team to be able to see the overall health of your entire customer base, drill down into specific customers and/or customer segments, and then identify potential problems. Your customer success team can answer questions about churn cases and help you prevent unpleasant situations that may affect customers.

Give the Right People the Right Data and Tools to Do the Right Job

Hire customer success managers who understand—or can learn—how to act on data. Give them the data they need. Empower your customer success team to use the data as their knowledge and experience suggest. This will be much more effective than trying to create a playbook of preset solutions for different situations.

At the same time, equip your customer success managers with any tools you can find that help them perform their roles as effectively and efficiently as possible. This allows them to focus on areas where they add value instead of routine administrative tasks.

Tilopay Repeat 

Tilopay Repeat offers a comprehensive automated billing solution, ideal for businesses with recurring models such as subscriptions and memberships. With robust tools to customize automated plans and tailor them to any business, Tilopay simplifies subscription management, customer management, and payment security through advanced anti-fraud processes. It also lets you offer free trials, recurring coupons, and flexible billing frequencies, ensuring a secure and convenient experience for your customers.