Dharmesh Shah explains HubSpot's Customer Happiness Index, a 0-100 metric that predicts whether customers will stay or cancel. Built from product usage frequency, breadth, and "sticky" features, CHI lets HubSpot measure which sales reps, marketing channels, and support teams deliver the happiest customers. The company recalculates it every 4-6 months.
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We have a number at HubSpot called the Customer Happiness Index, called CHI. And it's a geeky way to measure how happy customers are. It's a number from 0 to 100 that measures the probability that any given customer, given the option to cancel, will still be a customer next month. So we can go through, and we do, go through all 3,200 customers and we measure their happiness index. And the reason this is important is simplicity. The fact that it's a single number that ties to not profits— profits would be great, but it's hard to hug a dollar, right? I mean, it's just, it's hard to get employees all riled up and say, yes, I want the P&L to go up by 7% next month or next quarter. Yes, they need to care at some point. But the nice thing about the Customer Happiness Index is we can look across groups and say, oh, by the way, here are the 60 sales reps, here are the new people, Here are the ones that have been around for a while, and we measure the average customer happiness index for every single sales rep. Like, okay, are you selling happy customers? If you're not selling happy customers, you're doing something wrong. Your job is to produce happy customers at the sales point, right? All the way through. We look at marketing channels. When we sell through inbound lead gen through our blog, if we get a customer through that channel versus that channel, does that produce happier customers or less happy customers? We look at our support team. If someone talks to these 3 people versus those 3 people, are they more or less happier. And the idea is to have this single number that you can adjust over time because what goes into the number changes probably like every 4 to 6 months. So the 3 that kind of boiled down to for us was frequency of use. If they use the product every day, every week, they're more happy than if they're just not using the product every 2 months. Breadth of use, how much of the product are they using? Is it just one feature? Are they using 7 things? Sticky features, and this was the key one, is that there are certain features you will find That have an exceptionally high correlation to happiness. That says people that use this feature, even if they only log in once a week, they behave as if they're logging in 17 times a day. They have the same pattern because there's something about that particular feature that causes them to stick. And the weird thing is you won't know what that feature is. Your product management group won't know what that feature is. Your founder— like, you won't know until you actually sit down and measure it. So my advice is, Even if it's coarse, you're logging all this data anyway. Log all the data and try and measure it and try and get better at it over time. It's a very iterative process and it works wonders across the company. If I could just point back to one thing that says what made HubSpot tick, this is way, way, way high on the list. So I'd encourage you to do that.
