8 min read Chief Customer Officers (CCOs) make great customer experiences happen, ensuring every interaction is special for customers.
A lot of thought goes into the process of curating these interactions, and CCOs oversee the entire customer journey, including driving engagement, boosting retention, and ensuring customer satisfaction. They align strategies to marry customer needs with business goals.
To do this effectively, they need to keep a close eye on the metrics that truly matter.
Knowing what the right metrics are and tracking them efficiently is the key to making data-driven decisions and fostering long-term growth.
In this post, we share the key metrics every Chief Customer Officer should be monitoring to drive customer success and business results.
Table of Contents
12 important metrics for Chief Customer Officers (CCOs)
As a Chief Customer Officer (CCO), keeping track of the right metrics is essential for optimizing customer experience, driving growth, and ensuring that support teams are aligned with business objectives.
Here are the metrics that every Chief Customer Officer should have on their reporting dashboard:
1. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) measures how satisfied customers are with specific interactions, like a phone correspondence with customer support or support ticket exchange, products, or services.
Companies use these scores across every touchpoint in a customer’s journey to find how satisfied they are with the interaction or otherwise. Customer satisfaction is essential for identifying potential churn risks and uncovering the underlying reasons behind customer attrition.
How it is measured: CSAT is assessed through surveys sent immediately after a customer interaction in the form of a traditional questionnaire, an identifier, a pop-up, a persistent form on a website, an in-app prompt, an SMS, or another communication method.
CSAT score = (Number of satisfied responses (ratings of 4 and 5) / Total survey responses) x 100. This method is a reliable predictor of customer retention.
Why it matters: CSAT offers real-time feedback on customer experience efforts and helps pinpoint specific areas, such as response time or product usability, that need improvement. Regularly tracking CSAT can help preemptively address dissatisfaction before it leads to churn.
2. Customer Retention Rate
Retention rate indicates the percentage of customers who continue doing business with your company over a specific period. By calculating customer retention rate, companies can understand what’s making customers stay with them.
The same research is also the identifier of what makes customers unhappy, potential areas of improvement, and what companies can leverage to scale.
How it is measured: It’s calculated using the formula: Retention Rate = (E-N)/S x 100
Where:
- E = Number of customers at the end of the period
- N = New customers acquired during the period
- S = Customers at the start of the period
Why it matters: It’s significantly more cost-effective to retain existing customers than to acquire new ones. High retention rates indicate strong brand loyalty, effective support systems, and consistent delivery of value to customers.
3. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
CLV represents the projected revenue that a single customer will bring in during their entire relationship with a company. Recurring sales are the top revenue sources for a lot of companies, and CLV helps them identify the segment that’s worth high focus and investment.
How it is measured: CLV = (Average Purchase Value) × (Purchase Frequency) × (Customer Lifespan).
Why it matters: By understanding CLV, CCOs can identify and segment high-value customers and curate special marketing and sales efforts toward them to encourage more sales and improve profitability. Companies can also optimize engagement strategies for others.
4. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS shows how likely your customers are to recommend your business to others, aka the degree of their loyalty to your brand. It works by asking the one obvious question: “How likely would you recommend us to a friend or colleague? Rate on a scale from 0 to 10.”
How it is measured: NPS = Percentage of detractors – percentage of promoters
- Promoters, who rate 9–10, are loyal enthusiasts
- Passives, who rate 7–,8 are satisfied but unenthusiastic
- Detractors, who rate 0–6, are unhappy customers who could damage your reputation
Why it matters: A high NPS reflects strong brand advocacy and customer satisfaction. Monitoring detractor feedback offers an opportunity to address concerns and prevent negative word-of-mouth.
5. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
CAC calculates the total cost involved in acquiring a new customer. CAC includes marketing, sales, and onboarding expenses. It goes along with CLV, and companies need it to understand the value they are generating from new customers.
How it is measured: CAC = Sales and marketing expenses/number of new customers
Why it matters: CAC helps businesses justify the return on their marketing and sales investment and take measures that increase ROI, profitability, and profits.
6. Customer Churn Rate
The Churn or attrition rate tracks the percentage of customers that companies lose over a set period. It can be calculated monthly, quarterly, or annually, depending on your business model.
How it is measured: Churn Rate = (Customers at the start of the period − Customers at the end of the period / Customers at the start of the period) x 100
Why it matters: Lost customers are lost revenue, and a rising churn rate indicates major issues like poor support or unmet expectations exist. Churn data helps identify shortcomings in retention strategies and possible improvements in service.
7. Customer Engagement Metrics
There are a bunch of customer engagement metrics like session duration, feature usage frequency, click-through rates, and social media interactions that help companies understand how well customers are interacting with the business across various touchpoints or otherwise.
How it is measured: The engagement metrics and their measurement depend on the business model, customer journey, and industry.
Why it matters: Active engagement reflects how deeply customers are interacting with your brand or product. Higher engagement usually correlates with increased retention, higher CLV, and greater satisfaction.
8. Customer Success Rate
The success rate measures how effectively your product or service helps customers achieve their goals.
How it is measured: Measuring customer success rate varies by industry and business model but generally involves tracking key outcomes such as goal completion rate, adoption metrics, renewal and upsell rates, customer health score, and so on.
Why it matters: A high success rate means your offering is delivering on its promise, and the success rates can guide your product development.
9. Customer Feedback Analysis
This involves collecting and analyzing customers’ feedback from surveys, reviews, social media, and support interactions to understand their product/service experience and satisfaction.
How it is measured: Analyzing qualitative (like CSAT, NPS), quantitative (like sentiment analysis, thematic categorization), and actionable metrics (like resolution rate, time to resolution) regularly.
Why it matters: Direct feedback reveals customer pain points and unmet needs, enabling more targeted improvements across products, services, and support channels.
10. Customer Advocacy
This measures how actively customers are promoting your brand through testimonials, case studies, referrals, and positive reviews. Customer advocacy reflects actual actions taken, while NPS measures potential advocacy.
How it is measured: Tracking referral rates, UGC, loyalty program participation, social shares, brand mentions, and other similar signals.
Why it matters: High levels of advocacy often reduce marketing costs while boosting credibility and attracting new customers.
11. Customer Experience Quality Scores
This composite score measures the overall quality of customer interactions across all touchpoints, right from initial contact to post-purchase support.
How it is measured: It typically factors in CSAT, response time, issue resolution, consistency, NPS, CES, FCR, and so on.
Why it matters: It offers a holistic view of how effective your customer experience strategies are and helps CCOs identify areas for system-wide improvements.
12. Customer Onboarding Completion Rate
This measures how many new customers have fully completed the onboarding process, including initial setup, training, and first usage milestones.
How it is measured: Onboarding Completion Rate = (Number of customers who completed onboarding / Total number of new customers) × 100
Why it matters: A high completion rate indicates that customers are effectively guided through the onboarding journey and are more likely to adopt the product, remain engaged, and achieve long-term success.
Bonus Metrics
Some other important customer success metrics that companies can track include:
- FCR: First Contact Resolution is the percentage of customer issues resolved during the first interaction, without requiring follow-ups.
- Average Response Time: How quickly the support team responds to a customer inquiry.
- Support Ticket Volume Trends: The fluctuations in the number of customer support tickets over time.
Conclusion
Much of a CCO’s job is to figure out the right customer success metrics that give an overview of customer experience across the entire journey.
Solutions like Auralis AI come laden with analytical dashboards that track, measure, and summarize support automation performance and the true impact of AI on customer experience. We help ensure your efforts are not just efficient but also deliver the ROI your business needs.
Book a demo of Auralis AI today.
