Everything You Need to Know About Customer Success OKRs [+ Examples]

Customer success means ensuring that all customers of the business achieve their desired outcomes as they engage with or use your product or service. There are many means available to businesses to manage customer success, with one of the most common and successful tools being customer success OKRs. OKRs (objectives and key results) are a collaborative goal-setting tool used by customer success teams and other sectors of the business to put in place challenging and ambitious goals that provide measurable results. OKRs are a means to track progress, create alignment, and encourage engagement around your team goals. 

Since customer service is the first point of contact with the customer, it’s especially important to promote meaningful relationships and provide excellent service so you can drive mutually beneficial outcomes. Relationship-focused client management is central to setting your customer success OKRs, which is why this article outlines everything you need to know about these OKRs and provides you with customer success OKR examples. 

• What are customer success OKRs? 
• The benefits of customer success OKRs 
• Customer success OKRs examples
• Free OKR meeting agenda template

What are customer success OKRs? 

Customer success OKRs are objectives and key results that need to be obtained to achieve the objective within customer relationship management. These OKRs typically center around means to ensure that customers are satisfied and achieve their desired outcome while using your product or service. For that reason, customer success OKRs are goals that align the clients’ expectations with the vendor’s goals for a mutually beneficial outcome and an excellent customer experience. Since customers are the lifeblood of any business, when they’re satisfied with your organization’s business offering you’ll have a higher retention rate, referral rate, and levels of satisfaction. OKRs can help your customer success team foster high output management, team alignment, and increased communication across your business goals.

The benefits of customer success OKRs 

• Align team members
• Track project progress
• Overcome blockers 

1 Align team members 

Customer success OKRs help you and your customer success team find alignment because they keep everyone organized, encourage more collaboration, and increase communication across the team. The OKR framework also provides a great opportunity for team members to learn about what their co-workers are responsible for, promotes a better general understanding of the projects at hand, and encourages creative thinking as team members consider how to work together to achieve larger and more ambitious goals. As a result, your team will collaborate better and feel more aligned with the various tasks required to achieve the larger customer success goals. 

2 Track project progress 

A huge benefit of OKRs is that they track your customer success team’s progress. By clearly defining, recording, and tracking the progress of each OKR you and your team set, you’ll be more organized and ultimately more productive as a team. With Fellow’s Objectives tool, you can define and track your OKRs with the added benefit of reviewing these objectives during your team meetings so nothing is left out of the discussion. Because the key results from your OKRs are quantifiable, measurable, and time bound, you can easily gauge your team’s progress in Fellow. We recommend checking your progress weekly so you have the opportunity to review and potentially modify the key results to ensure they’re achievable. 

3 Overcome blockers 

Going over your OKRs every week will also help prevent any roadblocks from snowballing into larger issues that are more difficult to mitigate. If and when problems arise, you and your team are prepared to mediate them as soon as they arise so you can realign with your team and continue to progress. Because you’re meeting with the entire team, this check-in is a great opportunity to collaborate with other team members to brainstorm and problem solve any kinds of issues that arise so you can find the best solution possible. 

Customer success OKRs examples

• Customer success manager OKRs
• Time-to-value OKRs
• Increase Net Promoter Score (NPS) OKRs
• Customer outcome OKRs
• Product adaptation OKRs
• Customer experience OKRs 
• Product adoption OKRs
• Customer support OKRs

1 Customer success manager OKRs

Objective: Make sure that customer support is a high-performance team.

Key Result 1: Hold a weekly recurring meeting to allocate the team to specific customers.

Key Result 2: Organize at least 5 training sessions to optimize the customer support team’s performance.

Key Result 3: Monitor individual resolution rate, team resolution rate, and turnaround time to ensure that they’re all reduced by 20%.

2 Time-to-value OKRs

Objective: Decrease the customer success team’s time-to-value.

Key Result 1: Increase two-week feature adoption by 50% by the end of the month.

Key Result 2: Fully integrate customer data so products can be configured in less than one week. 

Key Result 3: Ensure that customers are fully onboarded in less than two weeks

3 Increase Net Promoter Score (NPS) OKRs

Objective: Increase NPS from 50 to 65.

Key Result 1: Implement a customer feedback tool to generate feedback on product improvements from 250 customers. 

Key Result 2: Conduct 50 customer feedback calls with active customers who have been using our product for 6+ months.

Key Result 3: Conduct 25 customer feedback calls with churned customers. 

Key Result 4: Identify and connect with 100 new product advocates. 

4 Customer outcome OKRs

Objective: Maximize customer outcomes. 

Key Result 1: Deliver all of the customer quarterly business reviews on time. 

Key Result 2: Improve customer health score by 20% per customer base.

Key Result 3: Source 2 promising expansion opportunities from the team’s existing customer base. 

5 Product adaptation OKRs

Objective: Drive customer success outcomes for existing and prospective clients. 

Key Result 1: Increase renewal rates by 15% and reduce churn by 10% by the next quarter.

Key Result 2: Increase adaptation, customer satisfaction, and overall customer health by 10%.

Key Result 3: Maintain a minimum NPS of 50. 

6 Customer experience OKRs 

Objective: Improve the efficiency of customer interactions. 

Key Result 1: Reduce the number of customer interactions by 5% before the resolution of a problem. 

Key Result 2: Increase the completion time when a customer calls to lodge a complaint by 20% using escalation team tiers. 

Key Result 3: Increase the customer resolution follow-up to ensure problems are resolved as best as possible via automated email communication. 

7 Product adoption OKRs

Objective: Increase product adoption by 25%. 

Key Result 1: Ensure all active and assigned accounts have at least 5 live touches. 

Key Result 2: Write re-engagement messages for 12 customer lifecycle points. 

Key Result 3: Improve NPS to at least 70 by the end of the quarter. 

8 Customer support OKRs

Objective: Ensure the team is delivering a state-of-the-art customer support experience. 

Key Result 1: Decrease first response from 1 hour to 30 minutes by allocating more employees to the live chat. 

Key Result 2: Resolve all of the tier-2 support tickets in less than 1 day. 

Free OKR meeting agenda template

Parting advice 

Implementing customer success OKRs will help your team quickly adapt to the various changes that arise while remaining on track to achieve your goals. OKRs are one of the most popular management tools because they help successfully drive your business towards growth opportunities. Whether you want to drive performance or implement a new change, OKRs are a great means to attain a solution. Overall, your customer success OKRs should help you drive alignment, track your projects progress, and overcome potential and current issues that arise as you and your team work towards your goals. If you found this article helpful, pass it on to someone who could use some tips to set achievable and ambitious customer success OKRs!