Customer success teams must keep customers happy and drive growth through renewals and upsells. OKRs give your team focus and align daily actions to business-critical outcomes. Here are three OKR examples to help turn customer relationships into revenue growth.
How to set customer succes OKRs in 3 steps
Start with retention
Define 1 objective around churn reduction and customer health metrics.Add adoption metrics
Create Key Results around feature usage, training completion, or product engagement.Layer in expansion goals
Once retention is solid, add Objectives for upsells, ARPU growth, or net revenue retention.
Customer succes OKR example 1: improve customer retention
Objective: Reduce customer churn and increase retention rates.
This objective focuses your team on keeping existing customers engaged and successful. It prioritizes early intervention and proactive support over reactive damage control.
Key Results:
Decrease monthly churn rate from 5% to 2.5%.
Increase Net Promoter Score (NPS) from 42 to 65.
Achieve 90% completion rate for customer onboarding programs.
Reduce time-to-first-value from 14 days to 7 days.
Customer succes OKR example 2: drive product adoption
Objective: Increase customer engagement and feature utilization.
This objective helps teams maximize the value customers get from your product. It connects usage patterns to long-term retention and expansion opportunities.
Key Results:
Increase monthly active users (MAU) by 25% within existing accounts.
Drive 60% adoption rate for key product features among active customers.
Achieve 80% completion rate for advanced training programs.
Increase average session duration from 12 minutes to 18 minutes.
Customer succes OKR example 3: expand revenue per customer
Objective: Grow revenue through upsells and account expansion.
This objective maximizes the lifetime value of existing customers. It focuses on identifying and capturing growth opportunities within your current customer base.
Key Results:
Increase average revenue per user (ARPU) from $150 to $200 monthly.
Achieve 120% net revenue retention rate.
Generate 25% of new revenue from existing customers through upsells.
Maintain 95% renewal rate for contracts up for renewal.
How to adapt these OKRs?
These templates provide a foundation, not a rigid structure. Customize them based on your team's unique situation and customer base.
For Early-stage companies: Focus heavily on retention and onboarding. Prioritize reducing churn and improving time-to-value before pursuing aggressive expansion goals.
For enterprise teams: Emphasize relationship-building metrics alongside usage data. Track executive engagement, strategic business reviews, and multi-stakeholder adoption.
For product-led growth models: Weight product adoption and feature utilization more heavily. Focus on in-app behavior and self-service success metrics.
For different industries: Adjust based on customer expectations. SaaS companies might prioritize feature adoption, while service businesses focus on satisfaction scores.
Start with the objective that addresses your biggest customer success challenge, then expand as your processes mature.
