Effort ratio

Support handling hours per dollar of an account's revenue, over the norm for accounts of the same tier and product. Far above it with one persistent category is a product fault or a commercial mismatch; far below it with falling tickets may be disengagement.

DefinitionSupport handling hours per dollar of an account's revenue, over the norm for accounts of the same tier and product. Far above it with one persistent category is a product fault or a commercial mismatch; far below it with falling tickets may be disengagement.

Onboarding excluded

A new account is high-effort by design for a quarter. Tenure is on the line.

Two conversations

Product category to engineering with the account list; configuration and how-to to the account manager at renewal.

How it is computed

Support handling hours divided by account revenue, compared with the norm for accounts of the same tier and product.

Example

An account paying $20,000 a year consumed 310 support hours, about $18,000 of cost. Accounts of its tier typically use 40 hours. It was sold a plan it had outgrown.

Where it goes wrong

Read as a reason to drop the customer. It is usually a reason to fix onboarding, the plan or a product gap.

Articles that use this term

Board and management reporting

Cost to serve by industry: what the account costs beyond the goods, on twelve desks

Cost to serve is what it takes to serve an account beyond the product, and what that is differs by desk: drops and returns for a distributor, adviser hours for a wealth firm, support tickets for a SaaS company, pursuit hours for a consultancy, detention charges for a forwarder. This hub gives, for twelve industries, the cost components, the rate each is stated at, the source, and the measure it feeds, with the guide for each.

16 Sept 20263 min read Board and management reporting · Customer service

Effort per account: support hours against revenue, and the accounts that cost more than they pay

How a customer service leader measures the support effort each account consumes, from ticket handling time and the account list: hours per account per quarter, effort per dollar of revenue against the norm for accounts of the same tier and product, the accounts far above it and the categories driving them, the accounts far below it that may be disengaged, and the two conversations, product and commercial, that the split points to.

16 Sept 20262 min read Forecast and pipeline

Ten questions a customer success leader asks, and the signal that answers each

The ten questions a head of customer success asks about the base, which accounts are at risk, which are under-using what they bought, which renewals are inside the window untouched, which accounts are surging or silent on support, which have to call twice, which onboardings are behind the milestone that matters, which are over their seat cap, which cost more to serve than they pay, which churned last quarter and why, and what the health score got wrong, each with the computed signal that answers it and the list it produces.

16 Sept 20263 min read Board and management reporting · Customer service

Effort ratio on five accounts: the whole arithmetic on one page

The complete support effort ratio calculation on five accounts, small enough to check by hand: handling hours from the ticket export, quarterly revenue, effort per thousand dollars of revenue, the norm as the median among accounts of the same tier and product, the ratio to norm, the category split that separates a product fault from onboarding from a commercial mismatch, the account whose effort is near zero and whose tickets fell, and the assertion that effort hours sum to logged handling time, so a reader can reproduce every figure and then run it on their own ticket export.

17 Sept 20263 min read How-to guides

The worked examples: every measure on ten rows you can check by hand

A hub for the worked-example pages on this site: each core measure computed in full on a book small enough to check by hand, ten accounts, ten deals, ten invoice lines, five clients, four territories, with every intermediate figure shown and the identity at the end. This page lists them by measure with what each example demonstrates, so a reader can reproduce the arithmetic before running it on their own export.

17 Sept 20268 min read