6 reasons every SaaS startup needs a customer retention dashboard

Every SaaS startup knows the importance of understanding their customer churn and customer retention numbers. These SaaS metrics are essential for growing and scaling your business, and they need to be understood with precision. Even early-stage startups that focus on acquisition need to keep customer retention metrics top of mind. One of the best ways to do this is to build a customer retention dashboard in Klipfolio Klips.

Here are 6 reasons every SaaS startup needs a customer retention dashboard.

1. A customer retention dashboard is faster and more efficient than manual reports

Retention metrics are integral to a SaaS startup's success, which means you can expect a constant stream of questions around retention. How did we do last month? How are we doing this month? How are we doing compared to last year? How do different cohorts perform?

By building an automated customer retention dashboard, you can anticipate these questions with clear answers because you’ve defined your organization's KPIs. You can also connect data from multiple services to save time and reduce manual effort. For example, you might calculate retention metrics by combining data from a payment system like Zuora and your CRM (Salesforce).

A customer retention dashboard puts your most important metrics front and centre, while handling the heavier lift of combining data from multiple systems.

2. Your customer retention data matters now

Waiting until the end of the month for a retention report doesn’t cut it for fast-moving startups. Data shared today is actionable today. If you wait until the end of the month, everything in the report has already happened. You can still study trends, but you can’t change yesterday’s headlines.

When you see signs that a customer might be at risk of churning, you can act on that information and sometimes save the account. Even seeing customers who churned today lets you reach out and, at the very least, learn what went wrong and, at best, convince the customer to stay.

A customer retention dashboard shows you trends as they develop. You don’t have to wait three weeks to discover that a feature change caused a shift in behaviour; you can see it and respond as it streams in.

3. A dashboard keeps retention top of mind

Customer retention isn’t only the responsibility of a customer success team; it should be part of your startup’s DNA. Share retention numbers with the entire organization. A retention dashboard built in Klipfolio Klips becomes a starting point for conversations across teams. Give everyone access to the dashboard, from development and QA to marketing and support.

There’s real value in sharing the retention dashboard with key members of your team. A wallboard TV dashboard keeps everyone thinking about customer success. For the executive team and the board, a mobile dashboard reinforces that retention is a real-time, always-on metric that’s core to your business.

4. Use your retention dashboard to take action

A real-time retention dashboard alerts you to events such as customer cancellations. That makes it easier to track why customers are cancelling, share quick feedback with product management and development, and try to help customers solve problems.

That last bit matters. In many cases, a quick outreach after a cancellation creates an opportunity to help the customer resolve the issue. Sometimes a customer cancels because the primary contact moved on and the new contact isn’t aware of your product’s value. At the very least, a quick conversation helps you understand what went wrong and prevent it with other customers.

5. Be proactive about customer retention

Just as the dashboard helps you act minutes after events happen, it also surfaces trends you can use to be proactive. Your retention dashboard should track metrics like customer cancellations, contractions, and expansions. Each metric is key to understanding performance against Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) targets for any given month.

Being proactive about customer retention often means stopping early indicators from becoming trends. Use this dashboard to intercept a bad month by running an expansion campaign with your marketing team. You could also run a customer webinar to help customers get more value from your product and reduce contractions and cancellations.

6. Celebrate your success

Dashboards have the power to unify a team around common goals and targets. The aim of a customer retention dashboard is to help you set new goals and reach new heights for customer success. It’s a simple way to rally the entire team around the customer and to make wins visible.

What are you waiting for? Build your customer retention dashboard today

Every SaaS startup needs to monitor and track customer success. The essential metrics for your dashboard include customer retention, churn, cancellations, contractions, and expansions. By putting these metrics on a real-time dashboard, you keep the entire team thinking about how to make customers successful.

Building a customer retention dashboard is possible for any startup. Here’s what you need:

• Access to the data services where customer success numbers are stored. Typically a CRM and payment system
• A few hours to set up the dashboard and automation

Looking for design ideas? Check out my live retention dashboard.