The Secret to Building an Effective Customer Success Dashboard
Tags: saas, api, product, management
Published: 2023-01-09 23:37:49

The secret to customer success is making your customers happy and supporting them to succeed. A simple concept – until you try to implement it. You’ll need a great product and a great customer service team, for starters. You’ll also need an in-depth understanding of the customer experience, including their pain points and how you can help solve them.

This is where things get trickier, but the answer could already be tucked away in your data. All you need is an effective customer success dashboard to automate the identification of issues and then support you to solve them – as the dashboard example below demonstrates.

## Customer Success KPI Dashboard Example

> ”A couple of years ago, when we encountered errors from sub-optimal client API practices, we might share a permalink with a team member so they could look at logs. That worked reasonably well, but you’re still sifting through logs. Now with Moesif, events that belong together can be grouped and easily shared in a dashboard. Issues can then be proactively addressed, resulting in better customer experiences.”
 Conrad Caplin, Co-Founder, Pronto CX.

[Pronto CX](https://www.moesif.com/casestudies/how-pronto-CX-never-loses-a-customer?utm_campaign=DevTo&utm_source=placed-article&utm_medium=paid&utm_content=the-secret-to-building) is an API-first FinTech company specializing in loyalty and payment services for diverse industries, from transit to live events. As they were going through rapid growth, Pronto CX looked for tools that could maintain their outstanding 100% customer retention rate. The firm began using Moesif to identify data validity issues and then troubleshoot them, using a customer success API dashboard to achieve maximum results.

###What is a Customer Success Dashboard?
When it comes to understanding and enabling [customer success](https://www.moesif.com/blog/customer-success/monitoring/Data-Driven-Customer-Success-and-How-API-Data-Provide-the-Leading-Indicator-of-Account-Health?utm_campaign=DevTo&utm_source=placed-article&utm_medium=paid&utm_content=the-secret-to-building), implementing an effective customer success dashboard that enables swift key performance indicator (KPI) analysis should be at the heart of your approach.

A customer success dashboard is a visual tool that helps you to track everything from how your product is being used to your retention rate, churn rate, monthly revenue and more.

###Why are Customer Success Dashboards Important?
Pronto CX’s customer success KPI dashboard is a testament to the difference that such a dashboard can make to customer satisfaction. It enabled Pronto CX to implement both reactive and proactive measures to drive up its customer success levels.

Retaining users starts with understanding the steps at which they get stuck when using your product and why. Pronto CX had previously employed a reactive strategy to API problems, giving their customers an opportunity to grow impatient and become at risk for canceling their contracts. Through Moesif they were able to automate the monitoring and display of API usage, gaining customer insights and identifying situations where Pronto CX could proactively intervene and help their customers be successful.

###How Do You Measure Customer Success KPI?
Customer success dashboards can support the journey from [new customer](https://www.brightgauge.com/blog/customer-success-dashboards?utm_campaign=DevTo&utm_source=placed-article&utm_medium=paid&utm_content=the-secret-to-building) to loyal, retained customer. To monitor that journey, you need to measure various customer success KPIs. Some of the most important include:

- Customer churn rate
- Customer lifetime value
- Monthly recurring revenue
- Customer support tickets
- Net promoter score
- Customer satisfaction
- You can also add in any KPI that will support understanding your own customers’ success and monitoring it, such as API calls as in the customer success API dashboard example above.

##Customer Success Overview Dashboard Template
Your customer success overview dashboard template will be shaped around your specific product. That said, it’s possible to outline some broad examples of what such a dashboard should include.

###What Should Be on a Customer Success Dashboard?
Start by understanding what success means to your customers and what your goals are. After all, [customer success stories](https://www.softwareag.com/en_corporate/customers/customer-stories.html?utm_campaign=DevTo&utm_source=placed-article&utm_medium=paid&utm_content=the-secret-to-building) vary hugely from business to business.

What you monitor is up to you. Say you have a sales rep who has implemented behavioral emails to try and accelerate API integration. You can monitor the impact on your dashboard.

Your dashboard will be a mix of customer health indicators and KPIs, monitoring both positive and negative customer success metrics. Positive metric examples include number of new customers and monthly recurring revenue. Churn rate, meanwhile, is an example of a negative metric.

###How Do You Measure the Effectiveness of a Dashboard?
You can measure the effectiveness of your customer success dashboard by monitoring your overall customer satisfaction and success levels. Another measure of effectiveness is the return on investment that your dashboard delivers.

For digital mobile payments platform [Reloadly](https://www.moesif.com/casestudies/sophisticated-api-analytics-for-non-technical-teams?utm_campaign=DevTo&utm_source=placed-article&utm_medium=paid&utm_content=the-secret-to-building), one measure of their dashboard’s effectiveness was the company’s ability to proactively identify upcoming issues, before they came to a head.

In terms of ROI, one way to look at it is that with Moesif we can get advanced knowledge of issues that allows us to be proactive and take action, which leads to greater customer satisfaction.” Emmanuel Piard, Co-founder and CTO, Reloadly

###What are 3 Benefits of a Dashboard?
When it comes to customer success, a dashboard delivers multiple benefits. Three of the most useful are:

- Reducing customer churn
- Creating more stable revenue
- Increasing customer satisfaction
- By supporting your customers’ success, you’re supporting your own.

##View Customer Success Metrics and Gain Insights
We touched on customer success metrics when talking about KPIs above. Monitoring rates such as [customer churn](https://www.moesif.com/blog/developer-marketing/Market-Your-SaaS-Platform-To-Developers?utm_campaign=DevTo&utm_source=placed-article&utm_medium=paid&utm_content=the-secret-to-building) provides an overview of customer success that can drive unique insights into your customer experience and your own business.

Key to identifying the customer success metrics that will provide the most useful and comprehensive oversight is understanding what your [customer needs.](https://weld.app/blog/top-customer-success-metrics?utm_campaign=DevTo&utm_source=placed-article&utm_medium=paid&utm_content=the-secret-to-building) You can then track your success in meeting those needs through relevant metrics.

###How Do You Track Customer Success?
Being able to view customer success metrics and gain insights is hugely valuable. But how do you do it?

In the case of the Amware example, tracking success meant monitoring the number of errors that customers were making when ordering using the Amware API, then working with individual customers to reduce the number of errors.

To track customer success, you need to implement a range of metrics that can provide an overview of your progress. Let’s take a look at a few of these.

###What are the Important API Customer Success Metrics?
The most important API customer success metrics for your business will be those that dive into the detail of what you’re achieving. Examples of such metrics include:

_Customer retention rate_

It’s all very well winning new business, but if your customers don’t stick with your product, you have a problem. Tracking what proportion of your customers you retain over time is key not just to understanding your customer success performance but to supporting the long-term viability of your enterprise.

_Customer health score_

You can use a customer health score to determine what proportion of your customers are ‘healthy’ and what proportion are ‘at risk’. On an individual customer basis, this helps you identify which customers are likely to grow and which you are at risk of losing. At an organizational level, it can serve as an early warning system if you identify a growing proportion of customers at risk.

_Net promoter score_

A long-established tool in market research, as well as in monitoring customer success and business growth, your net promoter score relates to the proportion of people who would recommend your business (or product) to a friend or colleague. Tracking your net promoter score can reveal a great deal about how positively (or otherwise!) your customers view your business.

_Customer lifetime value_

Monitoring customer lifetime value tells you what a customer is worth over the entire period of their relationship with your business. Calculating your customer lifetime value and then monitoring it to ensure that it increases is an effective way to track your growing customer success.

_Customer churn rate_

The lower your customer churn rate, the better. After all, it costs your business more to go out and find new customers than it does to retain existing ones. As such, working to reduce your churn rate can deliver long-term rewards.

_Monthly recurring revenue_

Your monthly recurring revenue is the amount of income that you get from your customers each month. Tracking it is essential to understanding your customer success performance and to monitoring the financial viability of your business.

_Customer retention costs_

We mentioned above that it’s cheaper to retain customers than go out and find new ones, but retaining customers is far from cost-free. By measuring the cost of your customer success work and comparing it to your number of customers, you can monitor how much it costs to retain each customer.

_Customer satisfaction score_

A customer satisfaction score measures, quite simply, how satisfied your customers are with your business. It is an excellent indicator of customer success, particularly when combined with the metrics detailed above. Together, they provide a comprehensive overview of your customer success performance.

##Making a Success of Customer Success Dashboards for API Products
Customer success dashboards for API products are a hugely important tool for understanding the impact that those products can deliver and the implications of that impact for the overall success of your business.

If you’re ready to implement a customer success API dashboard, why not get in touch with the Moesif team to discover how we can help you analyze, interrogate and monitor your customer success data?