7 Customer Happiness Metrics Bootstrapped Founders Need to Track
As you’re working to grow and scale your startup, keeping track of your performance in customer happiness is one of the most impactful things you can do. In other words — you can’t manage what you don’t measure.
However, you shouldn’t just rely on your judgment here (as a founder, you may be a bit biased on how easy your product is to use). From customer support ratings to positive app reviews and testimonials, there are plenty of ways to monitor your support efforts that will give you a clear idea of what you’re doing well — and some areas where you can improve.
Fortunately, most customer support platforms will automatically keep track of these SaaS metrics for you (and if not, make it really easy to find them), so all you have to do is check the stats regularly and tweak your process based on what you learn from them.
We like Help Scout for managing customer support, since we can easily see if the majority of our interactions are going well from our customers’ perspectives.
There are four metrics that every bootstrapped founder should start tracking, ASAP, and a few that you can adopt later, when your team is more established.
Conversation ratings
One of the easiest ways to track how you’re doing with customer happiness is to allow your customers to use support ratings to tell you how you’re doing.
After a support ticket closes, the customer should be prompted with a one-question survey that asks how the conversation went. Depending on which platform you use to manage support, this could be measured by emojis or words like “Great,” “Okay,” and “Not Good.”
While this metric doesn’t give you a specific reason why the customer rated the conversation the way they did, it allows you to get an overall picture of how your team is performing, and look a little deeper into why you may have received a negative rating.
Suggested benchmark: 80%
It’s tempting to set a goal of 100% here, and there’ll be weeks you hit that customer-love high, but it’s best to set a realistic goal since sometimes you’ll get a bad rating because you don’t offer a feature someone wanted, or someone was just having a bad day. Going with an achievable 80% means you (or your reps) won’t feel disheartened by those small setbacks.
Time to first reply
The time it takes you to reply to a customer is a big part of your first impression. If someone is reaching out, it’s because they have an issue or question your product, whether it’s something minor or a bug that’s impacting customers across the board.
Having a standard for reply time is necessary as you develop your customer happiness team. If you’re finding that this metric is higher than you’d like, consider the hours you or your support rep are working and answering tickets. If it’s not during your product’s peak usage hours, it should be (note — this is why it’s best to hire a support person in the same time zone/area as the majority of your customer base).
Suggested benchmark: 4–6 hours. Across our portfolio we range anywhere from 2 hours to 12 hours depending on the product, the number of customers, the types and frequency of requests, etc. So this one’s a bit personal, and should be tracked in tandem with your customer happiness ratings. If your ratings are stellar, and your time’s a bit higher, that’s probably fine. If your ratings are a bit meh, and your time’s a bit higher, you might want to set a goal to pull that in.
Resolution Time
Keeping track of resolution time allows you to pinpoint the areas of your business that may need some improvement. If a feature is constantly breaking, or someone on your team is hard to get a hold of, it may take the support rep a lot longer to resolve an issue with a customer.
Or if it’s taking your support agent a long time to get back to customers, their workload might be too big, or they may need to adjust their working hours to better accommodate when tickets are coming in.
Suggested benchmark: 12 hours. Again, this one’s really going to depend on your specific product, its complexity, and your stage of growth. We use 12 hours across many different products and find it’s enough time for most questions on most SaaS products.
Replies to Resolve
This one isn’t rocket science — the fewer (helpful) replies you have to a customer before you resolve an issue, the better. But, there’s a lot to learn from this metric if it isn’t where you’d like it to be. First off, support should always try to resolve the issue within the first reply. If they are consistently unable to do so, it might be a matter of communication issues within your team, something that needs improved within your product, or some training needs.
Tracking replies to resolve is also a great way to determine if you should be investing in support automation. If you’re constantly replying to issues that could easily be answered with a support doc or tutorial video, you can set up canned responses to point users to those resources.
Suggested benchmark: < 3. This will give you enough room in the average to cover more complex conversations, but keep your goal towards more immediate resolutions.
Once you’re in the habit of tracking the metrics above, you can think about monitoring these additional customer happiness metrics to help your business grow even more:
Sales wins through live chat & phone call
This typically isn’t something a tool will measure for you, but it’s a great idea to track how often you’re able to earn a paying customer or upgrade a member during a support conversation.
Positive app reviews/testimonials
Customers don’t hold back on the internet — especially when it comes to reviews. One of the quickest ways to gauge how your users feel about your product is by monitoring what they have to say online.
And if you’re noticing you aren’t getting reviews, it’s time to come up with a strategy. Because more reviews do equate to more paying customers, especially if your business is platform-specific, like a Shopify, iOS, or Android app. It doesn’t need to be complicated — simply asking users for a review after a positive support conversation is a great place to start. Just be careful to follow the terms of any platforms when it comes to review requests.
Number of support tickets and/or inbound conversations
Just like the rest of these metrics, knowing exactly how many support tickets you’re opening or conversations you’re tagging will give you a better understanding of what’s working and not working within your company. If a feature stops working and you get flooded with support requests, it makes sense to prioritize those tickets first. If you’re getting an influx of cancellation requests, it’s time to dig into the underlying reason, and so on.
To be even more specific, you can also break this down by the average number of tickets created per day and average number of tickets closed per day.
For more on metrics to track, how to hire for your support desk, and how customer happiness contributes to your business value, check out these startup founder customer service tips.
