Ever notice how the smallest signals from your customers can predict the biggest changes in your business? If you’re not paying attention to the right customer success metrics, you could miss the early warning signs or the hidden opportunities waiting in plain sight.
Customer success metrics help you see what’s working, spot trouble before it starts, and build stronger customer relationships that last. When you know what to track, you can turn every customer moment into a growth moment.
Main Takeaways:
- Customer success metrics provide visibility to forecast growth, spot risks, and optimize team impact.
- Experience-focused metrics help you measure loyalty, satisfaction, and friction in the customer journey.
- Tracking product usage and feature adoption shows how customers engage with your solution and reveals early churn or expansion signals.
- A strong customer health score blends quantitative and qualitative data to predict retention and guide proactive engagement.
- Building a metrics-driven culture with the right tools empowers teams to act on insights and drive durable growth.
What are Customer Success Metrics?
Customer success metrics are indicators that measure how effectively your business delivers value and helps customers achieve outcomes. They provide visibility into customer health, satisfaction, and engagement while predicting future behavior like renewals and expansions.
In the subscription economy, these metrics are essential for understanding the customer journey and uncovering growth opportunities. Unlike traditional sales metrics focused on acquisition, customer success metrics emphasize retention and expansion—the real drivers of sustainable revenue.
What success metrics help you achieve:
- Predict revenue: Forecast renewals and expansion opportunities with greater accuracy
- Identify risks: Spot potential churn before it happens
- Optimize resources: Focus your team’s efforts where they’ll have the greatest impact
- Improve experiences: Understand what drives customer satisfaction and loyalty
Strengthen leadership impact: Aligning metrics with executive strategy has never been more critical. McKinsey research shows companies with a single growth-focused C-level leader grow up to 2.3× faster
Customer Success Metrics Worth Tracking in 2025
Each of these metrics gives you a deeper look into your strategy, including customer sentiments, internal operations, and the list goes on.
1. Net Renewal Rate
Net Renewal Rate is the rate at which customers are renewing and expanding. It differs from Gross Renewal Rate, which shows the rate at which customers are renewing and does not consider expansion.
The most successful companies will have an NRR of over one hundred.
ChartMogul reports that top-quartile SaaS companies, particularly those with $15–30M ARR, often achieve NRR between 115–120%, setting a benchmark for what’s possible in a mature CS motion.
What you need to calculate NRR:
- The dollar value of contracts up for renewal at the beginning of the period (month = MRR, year = ARR). Contracts up for renewal are those that have expired or will expire during the time period.
- Total expansion in dollars of the current time period.
- The dollar value of renewed contracts that have renewed during the current time period.
2. Gross Renewal Rate (GRR)
Customers are going to churn, it’s inevitable (even for us). Gross Renewal Rate is the percentage of contracts renewed in a given period—be that monthly, annually, quarterly, etc. GRR does not include cross-sell or upsell in its equation. Increases in GRR mean that more people are renewing.
It’s a good indicator of your Customer Success effort; if people are renewing, they are obviously getting something out of your product/service or your customer experience.
How to calculate GRR:
- The dollar value of contracts up for renewal at the beginning of the period. Contracts up for renewal are those that have expired or will expire during the time period.
- The dollar value of renewed contracts that have renewed during the current time period.
3. Customer Churn and Retention Rate
Customer churn rate tracks the percentage of customers who leave in a given period, while retention rate shows the flip side—the percentage who stay. These metrics reveal whether your product and experience are truly keeping customers engaged.
Rising churn can point to onboarding gaps, adoption challenges, or service frustrations. Strong retention shows customers find value and are more likely to renew or expand.
How to calculate Churn Rate:
- (Customers at Start – Customers at End) ÷ Customers at Start × 100
How to calculate Retention Rate:
- (Customers at End – New Customers) ÷ Customers at Start × 100
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4. Expansion Percentage
Expansion Percentage measures how much revenue growth comes from existing customers through upselling or cross-selling.
A rising Expansion Percentage shows that customers find ongoing value in your products or services and are willing to invest more. This metric helps gauge the effectiveness of your upsell and cross-sell strategies and should increase over time.
How to calculate Expansion Percentage:
- Total revenue in a given time period.
- Total expansion revenue in dollars of the current time period.
4. Logo Retention
Logo retention measures customer retention by the number of accounts rather than revenue. While revenue retention may look strong, losing smaller clients can reveal issues revenue metrics miss.
This metric exposes churn patterns often hidden by focusing only on large accounts. If small clients leave, it signals that low-touch strategies need work or that your target market may need adjustment. Retention norms vary by sector, but according to Shopify, most industries fall between 70–80% average retention rates.
How to calculate Logo Retention:
- Total number of logos at the beginning of a period.
- Total number of logos at the end of a period.
5. Net Promoter Score
Net Promoter Score is a widely used metric for measuring customer loyalty. It asks: “On a scale of 1–10, how likely are you to recommend our product or service?”
Responses are grouped into Promoters, Detractors, and Passives. NPS is a leading indicator of future behavior, including renewals, expansion, and advocacy.
How to calculate NPS:
- Number of Promoters (answered 9-10).
- Number of Detractors (answered 0-6).
- Total Number of Respondents.
6. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
CSAT measures how satisfied customers are, often captured through a survey on a 1–5 scale.
With AI transforming engagement, Zendesk data tells us 88% of CX specialists say personalization is now critical to loyalty.
How to calculate CSAT:
- (Number of satisfied customers ÷ Total responses) × 100
7. Customer Effort Score (CES)
CES tracks how easy it is for customers to complete a task or resolve an issue. The less effort required, the more likely customers are to return and stay loyal.
How to calculate CES:
- Average response to “How easy was it to handle your request?” (typically on a 1–7 scale)
8. Customer Health Score
A Customer Health Score blends product usage, support history, adoption data, and qualitative inputs like CSM feedback into a single measure of account health. It acts as an early-warning system for churn while highlighting expansion opportunities.
How to calculate Customer Health Score:
- Assign weights to signals such as usage frequency, support tickets, survey responses, and sentiment, then combine them into a composite score.
9. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
CLV estimates the total revenue you can expect from a customer throughout their relationship with your company. It’s a long-term measure that helps identify which customer segments drive the most value.
How to calculate CLV:
- Average Purchase Value × Purchase Frequency × Average Customer Lifespan
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10. Conversion Rate
Conversion rate tracks how many users or leads take a desired action, such as moving from trial to paid, upgrading tiers, or adopting a new feature. It shows how effectively you’re guiding customers through the journey.
How to calculate Conversion Rate:
- (Number of conversions ÷ Total number of opportunities) × 100
11. Cost of Retention
Cost of Retention measures how much you spend annually to retain each customer, factoring in technology, headcount, onboarding, advocacy programs, and related expenses. To calculate accurately, use only customers retained from the previous year, excluding new acquisitions.
Not every factor will apply, but top-performing companies use multiple retention levers to improve efficiency. Over time, Cost of Retention should decline as operations are streamlined and processes optimized.
How to calculate Cost of Retention:
- Cost of Customer Success team: annual spend associated with Customer Success personnel.
- Cost of Technology: annual spend on software used to influence retention.
- Cost of Onboarding and Training Team: annual spend on implementing, onboarding, and training customers.
- Cost of Account Management Team: annual costs incurred by your Account Management team.
- Cost of CX Program: annual spend on improving CX or driving social interaction with your brand
- Cost of Customer Marketing: annual cost of your customer marketing efforts.
- Number of Active Customers: number of retained customers in the current year.
12. Active Usage
Active usage metrics track how frequently customers engage with your product. These metrics are powerful predictors of retention and expansion because they directly measure the value customers extract from your solution.
Key usage metrics for customer success analytics:
- Daily/weekly/monthly active users (DAU/WAU/MAU): The number of unique users who take meaningful actions in your product during a given timeframe
- Session frequency: How often users log in
- Session duration: How long users spend in your product
- Feature adoption rate: Percentage of users who use specific features
Declining usage often precedes churn, making these metrics essential early warning indicators for customer success teams.
13. Feature Adoption
Feature adoption metrics measure which product capabilities customers are using. These insights help you understand if customers are realizing the full value of your solution.
Track these feature adoption dimensions:
- Breadth: The percentage of available features being used
- Depth: How thoroughly features are used
- Time to value: How quickly customers adopt key features after onboarding
Customer success manager metrics should include feature adoption targets for their accounts, as driving adoption is one of their most important responsibilities.
14. Time to Value
Time to value measures how quickly customers begin realizing benefits from your solution after purchase. Shorter time to value correlates with higher satisfaction, better retention, and stronger references.
Ways to measure time to value:
- Time from purchase to first login
- Time to complete onboarding
- Time to first value milestone
- Time to full implementation
Turn Metrics Into Measurable Growth
The right customer success metrics are only valuable if you can act on them. Gainsight empowers your team to predict churn, drive retention, and unlock expansion.
Build for Sustainable Growth with Gainsight
The right customer success metrics give you the insights needed to build durable, predictable growth. By focusing on retention, expansion, and customer experience, you create a foundation for long-term success in today’s subscription economy.
With Gainsight’s Customer Success platform, you can transform metrics into meaningful actions that reduce churn, increase expansion, and drive long-term growth.
Ready to take your customer success metrics to the next level? Schedule a demo to see how Gainsight’s customer success platform helps you track, analyze, and act on the metrics that matter most.
