Customer success dashboards: How to build one that moves the needle

It’s no secret that existing customers are the backbone of any business. They make up

More and more customer success teams are shifting their focus to gross revenue retention (GRR) and using early risk detection as the foundation of their renewal strategy. Without a customer success metrics dashboard, teams often rely on manual tracking. They miss important risk signals and end up with inconsistent views of customer health due to siloed data.

Customer success organizations that implement a customer success dashboard can quickly track progress toward strategic milestones, which is essential to a successful renewal strategy. Discover the essentials success teams need in a customer dashboard and how to build one.

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What is a customer success dashboard?

A customer success dashboard is a centralized view of key metrics that show customer health, engagement, and overall success with a product. A customer success dashboard pulls data from tools such as CRMs, product analytics, and help desk ticketing systems like HubSpot’s Service Hub. Then, customer teams get a real-time understanding of how their customers are doing.

Customer success teams can leverage tools such as HubSpot Service Hub’s customer success management workspace to track key account health indicators and proactively reduce churn by leveraging actionable customer insights. When customer success managers (CSMs) understand their customers’ overall health, they can prioritize account outreach and work to reduce churn.

What should a customer success dashboard include?

A customer success dashboard should include a mix of outcome, engagement, and risk metrics that reflect the full customer lifecycle. Common metrics include customer health score, product usage and adoption, journey milestones, or time to value. To capture sentiment and risk, dashboards often track NPS or CSAT. Teams may also look at support volume, resolution time, and open escalations.

Collectively, these metrics help customer success teams monitor customer health, identify risk early, and tie customer success efforts directly to retention and growth. Let’s dig into some of these metrics in detail and talk about why they should be included in a dashboard.

Commonly Tracked Metrics in a Customer Success Dashboard

Customer Health Score

A customer health score is a composite metric that summarizes how likely a customer is to renew, expand, or churn based on multiple signals. Customer success teams can see account health and prioritize proactive action. Instead of relying on a single data point, it rolls up several indicators (such as many of the data points below) into one overall score, often categorized by colors such as green, yellow, or red.

Product Usage/Product Adoption

If customers aren’t using a product, they’ll have no reason to keep paying for it. By including adoption metrics in a customer success dashboard, CS teams can understand which customers need more support to see value.

The exact way to measure product usage will depend on the offering and company, but commonly used metrics include:

MAU (monthly active users).
WAU (weekly active users).
Number of active seats in use.
Feature-level adoption metrics.
And workflow or outcome achievement.

Time to Value/Product Milestones

While closely related to product adoption, outcome-based milestones help success teams understand whether customers are actually realizing value. These metrics show how quickly customers reach meaningful outcomes.

By tracking “sticky” features or quick-win use cases, customer success teams gain visibility into what is driving value. Teams can also see where customers may be getting stuck, and when proactive guidance is needed to accelerate success.

Onboarding Progress

Since onboarding sets the foundation for long-term retention and value realization, it’s important to track how customers progress through their onboarding journey. By tracking customer onboarding progress, CSMs can see whether their customers are completing key setup steps and adopting core features.

Customer Sentiment via NPS and CSAT

Tracking customer feedback is critical, and Net Promoter Score (NPS) and customer satisfaction (CSAT) are two commonly tracked metrics.

NPS measures loyalty by asking how likely a customer is to recommend a product, categorizing responses into promoters, passives, and detractors. NPS provides valuable insight into overall satisfaction, loyalty trends, and potential churn risk.
CSAT, on the other hand, is a customer satisfaction score that measures specific interactions or experiences, giving immediate feedback.

Together, these two metrics help teams understand both long-term customer loyalty and short-term satisfaction, complementing usage and health data to provide a complete view of customer success.

Support Ticket Data

Success managers should keep tabs on how often customers are reaching out for support, how quickly they’re reaching a resolution, and if they have any open escalations. Typically, a large quantity of support tickets indicates that a customer is having a difficult time with the product.

When CSMs can easily track help desk metrics within a success dashboard, they can reach out to the customer and offer personalized support. Tools like HubSpot’s Service Hub and its built-in ticketing system help teams automatically organize and track customer issues. CSMs can see which accounts are experiencing support friction and proactively step in.

Revenue and Retention

Many organizations want to see key revenue goals at a glance, making a customer success dashboard a great place to track gross revenue retention (GRR), net revenue retention (NRR), retention rate, and overall churn rate. Some dashboards also flag whether accounts are primed for upsell or expansion.

Stakeholder Engagement.

The level of stakeholder engagement each company tracks will vary, but here are a few common stakeholder engagement metrics to consider:

Customer champion identified. Without a dedicated customer champion, it becomes increasingly difficult to secure a contract renewal. By tracking whether or not an account has a dedicated customer champion, CSMs can be notified that they need to find a new point of contact within their account and start building a relationship.

Executive buyer engaged. Today, most software and B2B transactions aren’t happening without executive approval, so understanding whether or not an executive from the customer account has been engaged in a conversation is important to the renewal process.

Meetings attended/overall engagement. Disengaged customers are often the first to churn, but they can be difficult to identify before it’s too late. Monitoring customer engagement with the CS team helps flag these at-risk accounts and allows CSMs to prioritize outreach.

My Experience: Knowing your champions and stakeholders is essential at both the senior and individual contributor levels.

In 2021, most of my customers were part of marketing teams during what was an especially difficult job market, and many of my champions were frequently part of layoffs or workforce reductions. I luckily had software tools that helped me track those changes in POCs, making it much easier for me to see that risk and start account mapping to find a new champion.

In one of my previous roles, when we held a QBR or EBR, we would go in and check off whether or not an executive champion attended the meeting. This tickmark became part of our health score, and we regularly reviewed this information as we began the renewal process.

How to Build a Customer Success Dashboard

Find the right software tool.

To build a customer success dashboard, CS leaders will first need to identify which tool to use. HubSpot Service Hub users can use the customer success management workspace to easily build dashboards that track key metrics. Service Hub users will just need to enable the workspace.

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Customer success leaders should look for software tools that integrate with their CRM data, help desk ticketing platforms, and customer feedback tools in order to easily pull key data points into the dashboard. Service Hub’s customer success workspace can do all this and more. Success teams can create dashboards in the HubSpot interface they already use every day.

Identify key metrics and pull in the right data.

Before adding reports, service leaders should first decide which metrics are the most important to monitor. Many CS teams choose to track:

NPS.
CSAT.
Product adoption.
Account usage.
Support ticket volume.
NRR.
And GRR.

Once metrics are identified, the next step is to add reports or pull in data for those defined metrics. Having accurate data is key to creating an actionable customer success dashboard. Make sure that the reports are up-to-date before adding them to the dashboard. Service Analytics from HubSpot simplifies the process — no dedicated report analyst required.

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Create a customer health score.

Once customer success leaders determine which metrics to track, they can build a customer health score by assigning weighted criteria to important signals. While teams often monitor a wide range of metrics, not all of them need to roll up into the health score. Instead, CS leaders should represent customer engagement, adoption, and sentiment, and apply weights based on their relative impact on customer outcomes.

CS leaders using HubSpot’s Customer Success workspace can build health scores from scratch, then customize the criteria and weighting for greater granularity and precision. RevOps and CS teams should choose scoring labels and thresholds for the health score that best align with their business and customer base.

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Customize dashboard views.

Once dashboards have been created, RevOps professionals can customize dashboard views for post-sales teams. Whether dashboard views are customized by customer criteria or internal stakeholder needs, creating tailored views ensures everyone starts their day with the actionable insights. CS teams will often create dashboard views tailored to different internal stakeholders, such as:

A high-level overview for the VP of Customer Success.
Revenue-focused dashboards for sales leaders.
And views for CS managers to see the accounts in their territory at a glance.

CS leaders should also consider creating custom views for specific customer segments, such as accounts with no assigned success manager, top ARR accounts, or accounts with low health scores. This makes it easy for teams to keep a pulse on the key segments that require more oversight.

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Set up automated alerts.

Once the customer success dashboard has been created, service leaders should set up alerts for significant changes. When a customer drops below a certain threshold for any given metric, alerting the account team enables them to intervene early. HubSpot Help Desk feeds support metrics into customer success dashboards, providing contextual customer insights to support agents.

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Customer success managers should be alerted to changes in a customer’s overall health score, but it shouldn’t be the only signal they’re being alerted about.

I asked Olivia Sherman, customer success team lead, how she ensures that her customer success dashboards are actionable. She told me that she goes beyond just surfacing key risk and opportunity indicators. Instead, teams should build a pre-defined plan for all CSMs to implement when they are notified of changes in the data.

Sherman said, “Each metric is tied to a defined play in our team playbook: Low usage prompts a re-engagement call, inactivity triggers adoption or training outreach, and executive sponsor gaps initiate multithreading.”

Review, maintain, and iterate.

As with all major CS initiatives, customer success dashboards are not a set-it-and-forget-it program. CS leaders will need to gather feedback and measure whether or not the current dashboards are helping CSMs improve retention and reduce churn. Service leaders should ensure that dashboards are automatically updated as data changes.

CS leaders should regularly review dashboards to ensure they’re accurately tracking metrics. Additionally, as the CS team grows and matures, new dashboard views and filters can be added to provide more granularity.

Now that we’ve gone through the steps for building a customer success dashboard, let’s look at a few examples of success dashboards for inspiration.

Customer Success Dashboard Examples

Customer success dashboards should be tailored to a company’s unique goals and metrics, but service leaders can benefit from reviewing customer success metrics dashboard examples for inspiration.

While these examples are hypothetical, they reflect realistic dashboards that are often used by customer success teams across a wide range of company sizes and industries. Let’s explore each example and how they differ.

CS Dashboard for a Startup or SMB

For startups and small businesses, customer success dashboards don’t need to be complex, as long as the data is relevant and actionable. These dashboards often focus on a small set of core metrics, which then roll up into a simple customer health score.

A streamlined dashboard allows CSMs to quickly view individual accounts and understand, at a glance, how a customer is using the product, their onboarding and support experience, and their overall sentiment and health. This example dashboard highlights foundational metrics, like:

Onboarding progress.
Support tickets.
Churn risk.
CSAT.
Product usage.
And an overall health score.

My perspective: I’ve been a CSM at a very small startup where we didn’t even have the right tools to create a customer success dashboard. I was trying to track this sort of data in spreadsheets. This made it really difficult for me to accurately predict how my business was performing and prevented me from identifying hidden account risk.

I truly believe that if I had had the right software in place to understand account health, I not only would have been able to better spot risk early on, but I also would’ve been able to uncover potential expansion opportunities to expedite our company’s revenue growth.

CS Dashboard for a Mid-Sized Business

Mid-sized businesses will likely want to provide their CSMs with a holistic understanding of their book of business at a glance. They may choose to surface additional data points in their dashboards that help their team members quickly understand revenue and risk simultaneously.

This hypothetical dashboard example shows how mid-sized or “hyper-growth” businesses may include additional data points such as revenue trends, upcoming renewal opportunities, key risk indicators, and the number of accounts with zero touchpoints in the last 30 to 60 days.

CSM Perspective: I like that this dashboard example brings in more revenue-centric data. By surfacing key metrics that impact renewal, expansion, and churn, customer success managers can prioritize their account efforts and act more strategically.

CS Dashboard for an Enterprise Business

Because enterprise organizations tend to be more complex, CSMs need visibility into a broader set of data points to identify issues early and support successful renewals. Incorporating skey stakeholder engagement, strategic milestones, and outcomes elevates the dashboard to support strategic account management.

This hypothetical dashboard brings together multiple dimensions of account health and risk. In addition to overall health and revenue insights, customer success managers can quickly assess product adoption, support interactions, progress against strategic milestones, and average time to value.

CSM Perspective: Being able to see ROI and outcomes achieved for your accounts is a game-changer. As a CSM, I’ve found that it’s also important to keep tabs on enterprise customers’ support ticket resolution times so you can intervene on their behalf when necessary. Adding that data point to a dashboard makes it much easier for CSMs to keep track of.

CS Dashboard for Companies With a Complex Product

In the SaaS world, many companies offer multiple products or key features that need to be tracked separately for usage and ROI. For organizations with complex offerings, building an actionable customer success dashboard requires capturing more nuanced metrics and data points at the product or feature level.

In this example, a customer success manager could open an account within their portfolio and view detailed metrics, including:

Adoption across products or features.
Progress toward strategic milestones.
Achieved outcomes.
And stakeholder engagement levels.

This enables CSMs to gain a holistic view of product adoption. If certain products show lower adoption, they can be flagged as at-risk. Teams can implement targeted strategies to prevent those specific products from being churned at renewal time.

CSM Perspective: I’ve worked at companies that have a complex product setup, and having insights into product or feature-level adoption for my accounts was the key to truly driving early risk-mitigation.

My company took it a step further and weighted the product usage and adoption of our “stickier” features higher within the overall customer health score, since we knew that customers who adopted those features were statistically more likely to renew. This helped our CSM team regularly focus on driving adoption of those features for our portfolio of customers.

Frequently Asked Questions About Customer Success Dashboards

What is the difference between a customer success dashboard and a customer service dashboard?

Although both customer dashboards focus on customer data, a customer success dashboard is primarily proactive and strategic, while a customer service dashboard is reactive and operational.

Customer success dashboards are used by CSMs, account managers, and leadership teams focused on retention, growth, and proactive engagement. Customer service dashboards are used by support agents, team leads, and operations managers to optimize workflows.

Which metrics should I include in a customer health dashboard?

A customer success dashboard should focus on actionable metrics that provide a clear view of customer health, adoption, engagement, and risk. Customer success leaders can leverage tools like HubSpot Service Hub Analytics to quickly pull reports into their customer health dashboards.

For product adoption, teams should track usage across products, login frequency, and license or feature-level usage to identify underuse. Engagement metrics, such as stakeholder interactions, CSAT, and support ticket volume provide insight into key customer touchpoints. Tracking milestones, ROI, and customer outcomes helps CS leaders understand the value customers are receiving from the product.

How do I build a CSM dashboard that saves time?

Customer success leaders can build dashboards that save time by focusing on the most actionable metrics for daily account management, automating data inputs, and customizing dashboard views for CSMs. Pulling data automatically from CRMs and survey tools ensures the dashboard stays up to date without manual effort.

HubSpot’s Service Hub customer feedback tools allow teams to survey their customers to see where the product/service can improve. CS leaders can then pull this critical customer sentiment data into their customer success dashboards to help CSMs prioritize their account management.

How do I connect billing and product data without silos?

To build an effective customer success dashboard, billing and product data should be integrated into a single, unified system. This typically starts with identifying all the sources of relevant data, such as the CRM, subscription or billing platform, and support tools.

Next, consistent customer identifiers should be used across all systems. Automating these connections reduces manual effort and ensures that dashboards update in real time. HubSpot’s customer success management workspace enables CS leaders to sync product data into the overall customer success workspace, eliminating siloed data.

When should you add more metrics to your dashboard?

RevOps professionals should consider adding more metrics to a dashboard only when they provide actionable insights without overwhelming the team. Metrics can also be added when the customer base, product offerings, or business priorities evolve. Dashboards are most effective when they remain focused on key indicators that drive decisions.

Surface actionable insights that drive renewals with a customer success dashboard.

For customer success leaders who are tired of manually aggregating metrics from different tools, it’s time to build a customer success dashboard. CS teams leveraging customer success dashboards glean holistic insight into their customers’ health. They can proactively identify at-risk accounts, prioritize outreach, and align post-sales teams.

HubSpot’s Service Hub includes a dedicated customer success workspace that unifies CRM, product usage, support history, health scoring, and renewal data in a single dashboard.

By offering customizable health scores, HubSpot Service Hub provides customer success teams with a 360-degree account view without switching between systems. CS leaders can leverage Service Hub to build dashboards that save time, reduce manual work, and improve customer outcomes.