Customer Success Considerations: SaaS Average Session Duration

As a SaaS CSM, what metrics are you tracking to give you a sense of customer satisfaction? You’re probably looking at NPS, survey feedback, and engagement rates to understand better how a customer is feeling and what they are thinking about your team and your product. But what about how they’re using the product itself?

Breaking down Average Session Duration

One of the most useful product-based metrics CSMs can use to gauge user satisfaction and engagement is Average Session Duration. This metric looks at how long individual users spend on a platform during a single session. Analyzing the average session duration – aka the total time users spend in the product during a single session over the total number of users on the site in the same period – can help CSMs:

  • Identify lags or gaps in product usage that could indicate a more significant product issue or customer disengagement.
  • Better understand a product’s core value by seeing where users spend their time and for how long.
  • Build more robust user stories to help with future sales and marketing efforts.
  • Expand on the customer satisfaction metric by gathering data on how much time end users spend in the product.

Why should CSMs track product metrics?

SaaS-based CSMs aren’t strangers to working with product-driven data and metrics. Customers work with vendor organizations to realize value from their products and services. As such, it stands to reason that these products can provide a wealth of information and data on user habits, customer engagement, and other vital insights.

Building a holistic, full-picture view of a customer’s success metrics means going above the standard NPS and other qualitative metrics that most CSMs start with. These product-driven metrics (average session duration, product usage rates, total adoption rates, program completion rates, etc.) are real-life indicators of how engaged end users are with a product. After all, while a customer contact may be all smiles and words of affirmation on a call, if nobody is using the product, the CSM will face a tough conversation come renewal time.  

Want to learn more?

For many CSMs, the sheer number of customer support metrics, both qualitative and on the product side, can feel overwhelming. With ClientSuccess, customer success teams can keep track of all the different data points available and easily organize this information to build a holistic view of customer satisfaction.

You can learn more about other customer success metrics with these additional resources from ClientSuccess:

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