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Getting started with metrics can be difficult! Here's a list of some common metrics you and your product or customer support partners may use to determine whether your work connects to theirs. No matter where you are on your journey, you don't have to go it alone. So much of communicating impact is highlighting how the metrics your colleagues care about change when you're involved.
Product Viability metrics
- Average revenue per user (ARPU): the revenue generated per user monthly or annually
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV or LTV): the revenue a user will generate over the long term
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): all the costs spent on attracting customers (marketing, sales outreach, advertising, etc.)
- Daily Active User (DAU), Weekly Active Users (WAU), or Monthly Active User (MAU): how many unique visitors or users you have per day, week, or month
- Bounce Rate: the percentage of users who visited only one page of a website or app and left
- Customer Retention Rate (CRR): the percentage of customers who remained customers after a certain time period
- Customer Churn Rate (CCR): the percentage of customers no longer remained customers after a certain time period
- Net Present Value (NPV): Net present value is the present value of the cash flows at the required rate of return of your project compared to your initial investment
- Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): your recurring revenue is normalized into a monthly amount. It's a metric usually used among subscription and SaaS companies
Product Desirability Metrics
- System Usability Scale (SUS): provides a “quick and dirty,” reliable tool for measuring the usability of a product. It consists of a 10-item questionnaire with five response options for respondents, from Strongly agree to Strongly disagree. Rohan Irvine created a Google Sheet calculator here
- Customer Effort Score (CES): indicates the ease with which your product solves a customer use case
- User Error Rate: the percentage calculated by the number of errors a user has while trying to complete a task by the total number of attempts.
- First Click Testing: examines what a test participant would click on first on the interface in order to complete their intended task
- Time-on-task: The average amount of time it takes users to complete a given task from the moment they start until they are done
- Task success rate: The level to which users can successfully complete tasks using the product
- Mean number of [key action] per user: The average number of a user is performing a key action with the product or service
- Mean time between [key action] per user: Another actionable way of examining engagement is by tracking the time that passes between visits to or usage of a specific key feature or service
- Heuristic Evaluations: A method for finding the usability problems in a user interface design so that they can be attended to as part of an iterative design process
- Tomer Sharon also created a resource for KEI (Key Experience Indicators), which is a great start to finding metrics to connect to business metrics.
- Two more Google sheet templates from Rohan Irvine
- UMUX: a follow up to SUS, it’s intended to be similar to the SUS but is shorter and targeted toward the ISO 9241 definition of usability (effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction). It contains two positive and two negative items with a 7-point response scale. (more about UMUX here)
- SUPR-Q: The SUPR-Q (Standardized User Experience Percentile Rank Questionnaire) is an 8 item questionnaire for measuring the quality of the website user experience. (more about SUPR-Q here)
- QA First Pass Rate: measures the percentage of Tickets that pass QA the first time without stimulating a return transition or defect sub-task
- Alt Tag Rate: Alt text (alternative text) describes an image on a page. Alt text helps visually impaired people understand what the image shows, helps search engine bots understand image contents, and appears on a page when the image fails to load.
- WCAG Compliance Rating: WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and helps keep the internet accessible to everyone regardless of their needs or what modifications they may require. The requirements branch out three levels of compliance A, AA, AAA.
- Accessibility Score: An accessibility score is a measure of how well a website conforms to accessibility guidelines and best practices.
- Screen Reader Compatibility: Shows how different HTML elements behave in commonly used screen readers
Customer Support metrics
- First Contact Resolution: the percentage of contacts that are resolved on the first contact
- Average Handle Time (AHT): the average time it takes for a customer service representative to complete one transaction with a customer
- Channel Mix: the relative proportions of service channels your customers favor
- Average Wait Time: the average time customers are put on "hold" during a support call or contact
- Cost Per Call (CPC): the average cost incurred by a support center for each call it handles
- First Response Time (FRT): the time it takes customers to reach a qualified customer support agent after making a contact request
- First Contact Resolution (FCR): the successful resolution of a customer issue within the customer’s first call
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): the percentage of customers rating their likelihood to recommend a company, a product, or a service
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): the percentage of customers whose expectations are met or surpassed while using products and services
Operational Metrics
- Utilization
- # projects using Design System components/month
- Avg # Design system components used/month
- Workshops provided/month
- Courses delivered/month
- Avg time job posted to hire date
- Process
- Avg ticket completion rate/month
- Level of Effort (LOE) accuracy/month
- Efficiency
- Avg time spent meetings vs. “making” time/month
- Avg ticket turnaround time/month
- Avg Time-to-deliver specific tasks/month
- Team
- % People from underrepresented groups in leadership roles
- Team survey scores, similar to customer satisfaction/month
- Learning
- Avg training budget allocated vs. used/month
- # people attending training/month