If you’ve worked on a customer education team you’ve probably been asked to measure the success of your work performance. Whether you’ve used KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to measure individual performance or OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to measure team contribution to organizational strategy, you know that finding the right numbers to follow can be difficult and time consuming. In this post, I’ll talk about common numbers that can quantify the success of your customer education team.
Net Promoter Score
There’s no debate over the utility of tracking the NPS (Net Promoter Score) of customer education programs. It is a strong indicator of learner satisfaction, and the best indicator of customer loyalty that your training program can offer. The wording of an NPS survey question is “How likely are you to recommend… to a colleague?” Respondents answer between 1 and 10, with 10 being the most likely to recommend. Any responses between 1 and 6 are considered detractors. Respondents who answer 7 or 8 are considered neutral, and respondents who answer 9 or 10 are promoters.
Dectractors | 1-6 |
Neutral | 7-8 |
Promoters | 9-10 |
Subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters to calculate your NPS.
% of Promoters - % of Detractors = Net Promoter Score
Product Adoption > Knowledge Acquisition
Okay, I know. We’re basically teachers, and teachers give tests, so we should be measuring how much our customers learn, right? Sure. Why not? Go ahead and measure knowledge acquisition. It doesn’t hurt, but it doesn’t really help either. Your goal isn’t to get your customers to pass a test. It’s not even to make them product experts. Your goal is to get them where they need to be, and for that destination to happily coincide with their habitual use of your company’s product. Of course, you don’t get to take credit for product adoption. You have to exclusively measure the adoption of users who have completed training opposed to those who haven’t to show that your training correlates to customer success. There are several metrics that measure product adoption, but the Percentage of Users to Perform a Key Action tends to show a statistical relationship to users who have completed training. After all, your training program promotes key actions that lead to moments of value, right?
Find the number of users who have completed a key action and the number who have engaged in training and plug them into the formula below.
COS(𝝅/(1+√(100*1000/ 50 / 90)))
Adjust the numbers below to calculate the adoption correlation of your training program.
A score of 1 means there’s a positive correlation. A 0 means no correlation, and -1 means a negative correlation. The table above has a correlation of about 0.85. Anything greater than 0.75 is considered strong.
There are several product adoption metrics that you can use besides the number of users to perform a key action. This one is particularly convenient because it works with two sets of binary variables and it shows the relationship between your product curriculum and user performance. You can use the same method to find a correlation between MAUs and user training.
Support Tickets
The last metric I’m going to talk about is the number of support tickets. The main point to creating a customer education program is to help your business scale. Customer success managers and product trainers are expensive. A good customer education program makes everyone’s life easier. If your program is doing its job, it should be reducing the effort of CSMs and support teams. Be sure to take frequent snapshots of how many support tickets your users have opened month over month, and sort open tickets by product area. As you release new training content, look for reductions in ticket volume to demonstrate the effectiveness of your program.
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