Glossary
Cohort
A cohort is a group of customers or employees who started in the same period, tracked together over time so you can compare January's signups with June's. Cohorts separate the two things a single average always mixes up: whether the business is getting better, and whether it is simply getting bigger. Any retention question worth asking needs them.
01
Why an average retention figure hides the answer
Not a weekly row, and not really a Scorecard row at all. Cohort analysis belongs to the quarterly review, where it answers whether the changes you made are working for the customers who joined after you made them. The weekly board carries the leading rows; cohorts say whether last quarter's leading rows were worth running.
A blended average tells you what the whole customer base is doing, which is mostly what your oldest customers are doing. Split by start month and the picture changes. A product that has genuinely improved shows each new cohort holding on better than the last, and no company-wide average will show you that until years later.
Worked example: A subscription box service saw flat overall retention for a year and assumed its onboarding changes had done nothing. By cohort, customers who joined after the change kept sixty-one percent at month three against forty-eight percent before it. The blended figure had been held down by two large older cohorts still working their way out.
Sources: klipfolio.com/kpis/saas; kpi.org/kpi-basics/dashboarding-and-analysis
Churn rate
Churn rate is the share of customers, or of recurring revenue, that goes away in a period: customers lost divided by customers at the start of it.
02Net revenue retention
Net revenue retention measures what happened to the money you already had, comparing revenue from existing customers now against a year ago.
03Metric
A metric is any measurement your systems can produce: page views, tickets closed, average order value, headcount, days since the last accident.
04KPI examples by department: sales, ops, finance, HR
Concrete KPI examples for each department in a small company, tagged leading or lagging and weekly or monthly, to help you build a Scorecard that works.
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