Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

KPIs versus goals

KPIs and goals are not interchangeable. Goals reflect your overall objective or growth milestone, while KPIs are measurable markers of how you achieve your goals.

KPI examples

Tailor your KPIs to your business model and to measure your customer success. Common KPIs include:

• Revenue metrics - conversions, renewals, churn, upsells
• Adoption metrics - product usage, upsells
• Customer experience metrics - Net Promoter Score, Customer Effort Score, Customer Satisfaction
• Support efficiency metrics - ticket deflection, escalations, cost per case

OKR framework

To help differentiate KPIs and goals, you can follow the OKR (objectives and key results) approach. OKR is a best practice of setting and communicating company, team, and employee objectives and then measuring progress based on achieved results.

Objectives are:

• Ambitious
• Qualitative
• Time-bound
• Actionable by the team

Key results are:

• Measurable and quantifiable
• Make the objective achievable
• Lead to objective grading
• Difficult but not impossible

Essentially, key results are stepping stones towards achieving the objective(s) and should align to company-wide objectives, even if it is a smaller departmental project.

Tactics to determine KPIs

Clear and correct KPIs are key to setting up yourself or your customers for success. Customers often know overall, company-wide goals but aren’t sure how to get there. 

1. Ask Directly - pose strategic questions about how individuals or departments are measured and what success looks like.
2. Lead the conversation - ask about responsibilities, talk about what is already well-known to prompt conversation, and share stories with good or bad outcomes for examples of lessons learned.
3. Infer  - use your experience to make recommendations and test, making sure to revisit the suggestion at a predefined time.