Here at SaaS Academy Advisors, we frequently talk about how running an Academy is akin to being the CEO of a business.
We believe this because:
- You build a (customer academy) product and obsess intensely over its quality
- You align with other business units to ensure your product is solving the intended problem, it's running like a well-oiled machine, and is consistently improving its impact on the business.
- You either align and influence marketing and sales departments or market and sell it yourself.
- You care about your own program's metrics and how it's helping to improve the business' top-line metrics (retention, revenue, CSAT, etc.) and how it influences other departments' successes.
Below, you'll see the various metrics and KPIs an Academy leader should track.
And before we dig in, not all of these metrics will matter at first, but as your program matures and grows in size and impact, you'll begin to pick up new metrics that are part of your core tracking that you may decide to move the needle on.
Academy Metrics
- Registration Rates or Sign-Up Rates
- Completion Rates
- Drop-Off Rates
- Student or User Growth
- Average length of time to complete
- NPS for each course, class, & certification
- Behavior change
- Knowledge Acquisition (through an assessment) & pass/fail rates
- Content development time
- Learner Engagement over time
- Top reasons people decide to learn from you
For more mature Academy programs:
- Number of courses/person
- Gateway class, course, or certification
- Top sources for traffic
- Top sources for sign-ups
- Top sources for completions
- Landing page or course page conversion rates
- Number of net new leads generated for business
- Number of net new customers influenced
- Cost of learner acquisition
Top-Line Business Metrics
- Revenue
- Customer retention / decease in churn
- LTV (Lifetime Value)
- CSAT/NPS
Customer-Education Metrics
- Product adoption or usage metrics
- Customer retention
- Customer NPS
- Time-to-value
- Time to key activation events
- Support ticket volume
- Change in products/apps used
- Logos per CSM/AM
- Time saved for Customer Success Manager
Marketing Metrics
- Impact on net new leads generated for business
- Impact on net new customers influenced
- Impact on freemium users
- Top sources for traffic
Knowledge Doc Metrics
- Average article sentiment or NPS
- Average time from doc request to completion
- Average # or % of requests closed per month
- # or % of articles returned after review (needing to be reworked)
- Contact rate vs knowledge base visits
- Conversations resolved on first contact
- Failed searches
Employee Success Metrics
- Onboarding & training completion
- Time to productivity
- Voluntary and involuntary new-hire turnover
- New hire retention
- New hire eNPS
Partner Success Metrics
- Changes in the number of partners
- Revenue sourced through partners
- Number of deals registered
- Average time to close deals
- Number of courses attended per partner
- Customer satisfaction with partners
- Partner NPS/satisfaction
What did we miss? What metrics do you track with your Academy?
