Customer Success teams have become an integral part of best-in-class organizations. With a holistic view of buyers, Customer Success teams are increasingly expected to provide exceptional customer experience and share insights company-wide. Setting Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is important to stay focused and build efficient cross-functional collaboration.
To elevate your goal-setting strategy, consider the Customer Success OKR Examples in this article.
📑 What are OKRs? The meaning of OKR is different for each level of a company, from the company objective to personal OKRs.
Understanding OKRs may be easy, but implementing them can be a daunting task.
- Are there instances where OKRs do not work?
- What OKRs really do for your business?
- Are you ready for OKRs?
- How long does it take to implement OKRs and see value?
To know everything you need to know about launching OKRs successfully, check out this recent webinar
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How to Write Relevant Customer Success OKRs
While the OKR framework is easy to understand, when it comes to writing OKRs for customer success teams, that’s where the challenge lies. A good way to start is to break down the OKR process into simple concepts.
The Objective – This is an improvement area or problem statement that you want to address in a quarter.
💡 Ask yourself “What are the areas that need improvement?” or “What is the key challenge that needs to be addressed this quarter?”
Use this simple formula when writing an Objective:
Key Results – These are the measurable outcomes that determine how you are going to achieve your Objective.
💡 Ask yourself “What needs to be done to accomplish the goal?” or “How and what impact can be made to achieve the Objective?”
Initiatives – These are the activities, tasks, and plans that would be done to impact measurable outcomes.
💡 Ask yourself “What tasks need to be planned to achieve measurable outcomes?”
▶️ Mastering the art of writing good OKRs comes with practice and knowing the basics concepts.
This video is a good starting point to help you write meaningful OKRs for various teams across an organization while learning the OKR Best Practices.
👉 Read more to learn about Customer Success OKRs, their benefits, how they solve challenges, and can help identify the focus areas in the Customer Success lifecycle.
Metrics for Measuring Customer Success OKRs
Expectations are high from Customer Success teams and the biggest mistake they make is setting too many goals. Working on too many objectives deviates from the focus on what’s important. The best way forward is to choose specific goals and focus on measurable Key Results to assess performance.
Choosing the right metrics is important to measure Key Results accurately. Here are some metrics that Customer Success teams when creating OKRs:
- Activation Rate – The percentage of customers who complete a milestone in the onboarding process.
- Onboarding Churn – The number of evaluators who do not complete or drop from the onboarding process.
- Contact Rate – The number of customer inquiries generated in a specific period.
- Average Resolution Time (ART) or Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) – Refers to the average time it takes to conduct, close, and resolve customer inquiries effectively.
- Customer Retention Rate – Refers to the percentage of customers who continue using your services/product after a certain period.
- Engagement rate – The number of touchpoints through which users and customers interact with your product
- Expansion Percentage – The rate at which monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is growing month-on-month (through upsell and cross-sell opportunities) It indicates the health of your company.
- Customer Referral Rate – The percentage of customers who provide referrals about your product/services as compared to the total number of paid customers.
- Customer Support Net Promoter Score (NPS) – Measures customer loyalty based on ratings on a scale of 1 to 10. This score is a good indicator of how likely customers will renew, grow, and become brand advocates for your product/services.
- Customer Health Score – Determines whether a customer will renew, grow, or churn. It measures whether customer accounts are healthy or at-risk
🎯 OKRs are not KPIs. KPIs are tangible metrics used to measure business performance. Check out this KPI Guide to know how to set, track, and measure KPIs.
17 Customer Success OKR Examples
Goal setting for Customer Success teams can be challenging because measuring the value delivered is not often quantifiable.
Whether you are a Customer Success Leader, Manager, Team Leader, or Associate, you can create OKRs within specific focus areas that are aligned with your company goals.
To get you started and set you on the right path, take a look at these Customer Success OKR Examples.
We have free OKR templates available for Excel and Word to get you started. Check them out.
Improvement Area
Implementation and Onboarding
1. Objective: Improve customer onboarding experience through the Learning Center (LC)
KR 1: Increase the number of visits to the LC from 76 to 500
KR 2: Achieve 8% CTR on videos about tips and best practices
KR 3: Create in-product onboarding communication for all free trial users and video tutorial calls for paid customers
Product/Service Adoption
2. Objective: Personalize in-product communication for new customers
KR 1: Increase the open rate of in-product communications from 5% to 17%
KR 2: Increase bookings of follow-up meetings to 15 per week
KR 3: Conduct a post-meeting survey and attain a service quality rating of 8.5% or higher
3. Objective: Increase product adoption and improve engagement of high-value accounts
KR 1: Rewrite re-engagement messages for different lifecycle stages of at least 10 high-value customers
KR 2: Ensure 100% of high-value accounts have at least 2 live touchpoints
KR 3: Refine conversation tracks in the chatbot to make it more intuitive to provide faster support
Growth and Satisfaction
4. Objective: Increase the conversion rate of trial subscribers to paying customers
KR 1: Achieve 75% retention of subscribers after the end of the trial period
KR 2: Ensure 70% of new paying customers continue paying after 60 days
KR 3: Create an email drip campaign and achieve 27% CTR
5. Objective: Improve satisfaction rates of Enterprise Customers
KR 1: Address negative feedback and decrease the number of complaints from 15 to 3
KR 2: Increase positive referrals and feedback from 5 to 20 in the quarter
KR 3: Improve the satisfaction rate of Enterprise Customers from 4.8 to 5.5
6. Objective: Improve overall Customer Experience
KR 1: Reduce onboarding time to 24 hours
KR 2: Design and implement a drip campaign by the end of the quarter to shorten the onboarding process and streamline the customer journey.
KR 3: Respond to all customer support requests within 1 hour
Expansion/Renewal
7. Objective: Improve strategy to increase the satisfaction of customers at the end of the trial period
KR 1: Conduct a satisfaction survey and collect at least 1,00 responses
KR 2: Schedule 50 phone interviews with the most satisfied customers and 20 with customers who have churned
KR 3: Analyze responses and create a plan for improvement by the end of the quarter
8. Objective: Create a proactive strategy to improve customer success initiatives
KR 1: Attain an average health score higher than 50 by implementing a customer success platform
KR 2: Increase retention rate to be above 110%
KR 3: Ensure 100% of red-flagged accounts have reviews conducted
9. Objective: Introduce a new retention strategy to reduce the churn rate
KR 1: Create a retention strategy to reduce the churn rate to under 6%
KR 2: Develop at least 2 win back re-engagement campaigns
KR 3: Obtain at least 5 custom testimonials and success stories from paid customers
10. Objective – Create a strategy to improve customer retention and satisfaction
KR 1: Create an action plan to increase customer retention by 6% over the last quarter
KR 2: Conduct at least 10 reviews of paid customers and 40 interviews of churned customers
KR 3: Implement a satisfaction survey and obtain at least 50 responses from customers
Job Titles
Customer Success Managers
11. Objective – Automate to reduce the cost of customer support
KR 1: Identify 5 areas in the customer success process that can be automated
KR 2: Reduce resolution time of support issues using automation by 25%
KR 3: Personalize and automate 3 low-touchpoints to streamline support services
12. Objective – Increase relationship value with existing high-value customers
KR 1: Engage and strengthen relationships with 10% of high-value customers
KR 2: Identify the top 5% of high-value customers and create a personalized campaign
KR 3: Obtain at least 15 references in the quarter from high-value customers
13. Objective – Build a high-performance customer success team
KR 1: Conduct 2 training sessions in the quarter for all employees to improve performance
KR 2: Organize weekly reviews to assess progress and identify at least 2 areas of improvement
KR 3: Ensure at least 90% of team members use the best practices of goal setting
Team Leaders
14. Objective – Increase the efficiency of the customer support team
KR 1: Identify and analyze 5 areas that are causing a delay in the resolution of customer requests
KR 2: Create a report to help reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) of support requests to under 1 week
KR 3: Ensure all team members complete training programs every month
15. Objective – Build an effective customer support team to achieve excellence
KR 1: Ensure new hires complete 100% of onboarding training programs
KR 2: Conduct monthly meetings to review and set expectations for all team members
KR 3: Ensure all team members are using the prespecified tools and technology to increase efficiency
Associates
16. Objective – Improve customer resolution process
KR 1: Increase the number of chats and interviews to resolve complaints by 15% in the quarter
KR 2: Ensure the issues are communicated or transferred to relevant teams on time to improve the resolution rate by 25%
KR 3: Ensure 100% of issues are recorded and documented for future customer support training
17. Objective – Improve the customer touchpoint strategy and enhance interactions
KR 1: Identify, categorize, and optimize at least 3 high and low touchpoints customers use for resolution
KR 2: Decrease the time to log complaints and obtain facts from the customer by 25%
KR 3: Reduce the touchpoints or interactions required by customers for resolution by 7%
How can Weekdone Help?
One of our best resources at Weekdone is our CS team! We understand how achieving great company results starts with a clear understanding of the processes needed along the way.
Here’s how the Customer Success team in Weekdone ensures that you are on track when setting OKRs:
- Identifying and understanding needs – Once you’ve signed up, our customer success managers will connect with you to better understand your needs. They will provide a customized training program to guide you on how to adopt the product based on your needs.
- Understanding the product for better adoption – To learn what you can do with Weekdone, they will provide product demos, specialized OKR training, and workshops. This will ensure that you and your team members completely understand how you can use Weekdone effectively.
- Reviewing OKRs – Once you have created your OKRs, our customer success managers can personally review them to ensure that they are set correctly and guide you so that you can refine them to have maximum impact.
- Checking-in – If you’d like, after your first month tracking OKRs in Weekdone, our customer success team will check in with to review company/team progress and to understand how improvements can be made.
In addition, our customers gain unlimited resources in Weekdone’s Learning Center. A great place to learn about everything related to OKRs.
Whether customers want to become OKR experts, learn the OKR methodology and best practices, understand the common OKR challenges, or test their knowledge, the Learning Center is a go-to resource.
🏆 To see how adopting the OKR framework can create Customer Success OKRs with maximum impact, look at our real-world success stories.
As the market continues to shift, buyer needs are rapidly shifting. Keep up with the change, adapt quickly, and adopt smartly. Use a dedicated OKR software to set Customer Success OKRs and achieve optimal results