5 Critical Metrics Every Support & Success Leader Should Track (But Probably Isn’t)

Customer Support and Customer Success teams share a common mission: ensure customers succeed, stay engaged, and grow with your product. Yet too often, leaders in these roles focus on the usual suspects—CSAT, first response time, or ticket volume—while critical, high-impact metrics fall through the cracks.

Imagine this: a Customer Success Manager notices churn in a strategic account that seemed stable—there were no support tickets, CSAT scores were fine, and NPS hadn’t flagged warning signs. What went wrong? What signal was missed that could’ve triggered a proactive outreach? Support and Success functions hold complementary pieces of the customer story. But this story often gets fragmented across siloes.

Let’s explore five under-tracked yet transformative metrics that bridge the gap between operational responsiveness and strategic account health—metrics that matter not just for day-to-day support efficiency, but also for customer retention, expansion, and proactive guidance.

First, keep an eye on Customer Effort Score (CES). Most teams track CSAT for satisfaction (very common) and NPS for loyalty, but few measure how easy it was for the customer to get things done. CES captures friction—those small annoyances that don’t register in satisfaction surveys but quietly erode loyalty. When customers signal high effort—even if satisfied—they’re more likely to churn. CES is increasingly recognized for its predictive power around retention.

Second, embrace the First Contact Resolution (FCR) rate. Many teams track resolution time or ticket volumes, but FCR monitors how often issues are solved in one go—across all channels, not just calls. It’s a top-tier operational metric that cuts down frustration and indicates where your knowledge resources or training fall short.

Third, start tracking Conversation Volume Variance between Support and Success interactions. Volume spikes—even subtle ones—can signal brewing issues like feature confusion or onboarding friction. This isn’t about absolute ticket numbers, but anomalies: a sudden rise in support touchpoints for accounts flagged as “high health” might reveal unspoken misalignments, or gaps in documentation, product usability, or engagement. AI-powered tools that surface conversation trends help leaders catch these before they escalate.

Fourth, monitor Revenue Expansion or Upsell Signals originating from support interactions. This is notably underused: a feature request tacked onto a support conversation may indicate upsell readiness—especially when multiple stakeholders are engaging or when advanced use cases emerge. Linking support metadata with account-level revenue history can reveal promising expansion opportunities that support teams unwittingly uncover.

Fifth and finally, surface Customer Frustration Over Time—not just point-in-time CSAT or NPS. Track how frustration evolves: sudden negative sentiment increase across interactions may be an early churn flag, even if CSAT snapshots remain passable. This metric goes beyond surveys—it leverages real voice data, sentiment tracking, and conversation tone analysis across time. It’s a predictive guardrail few organizations pull into regular dashboards.

These five metrics—CES, FCR, Support-Success Conversation Patterns, Upsell Signals via Support, and Frustration Trends—offer both operational clarity and strategic foresight. They illuminate gaps that typical dashboards miss, giving leaders the tools to both ensure responsive service and drive account growth, proactively defuse churn risks, and deepen customer relationships.

At Isara, we help you capture those signals. Whether it’s highlighting rising frustration, tagging themes like renewal urgency or expansion interest, or surfacing escalations before they become crises, Isara connects your team’s daily chatter to strategic dashboards—across Support and Success.

Isara bridges operational insights with strategic account knowledge. That means support doesn’t just solve today’s tickets—it uncovers tomorrow’s growth or churn risks. Success doesn’t just renew accounts—they do it with foresight, armed with real-time sentiment and behavioral cues.