Customer Retention Rate (CRR)

Percentage of existing customers who stay.

CRR = ((Customers at end − New customers) / Customers at start) × 100%

What it measures

Percentage of existing customers who remain active over a period. The key is excluding new customers: you're measuring whether people who were already customers stayed.

Calculation Variants

Logo Retention: % of unique companies/users retained.
Gross Revenue Retention (GRR): % of revenue retained, capped at 100%. Shows the baseline stability of the business.
Net Revenue Retention (NRR): % of revenue retained including upsells. Can exceed 100%.

Benchmarks

Subscription businesses: Target 90%+ monthly retention
Enterprise SaaS: Target 95%+ monthly retention

Figures reviewed June 2026. Benchmarks vary by source and drift over time — treat as directional and verify against your own data.

What to watch

Rising: Your existing customers are stickier. Even small retention improvements compound dramatically — Bain & Company’s research found that retaining 5% more customers can lift profits by 25–95%.
Falling: Something is driving existing customers away. Segment by cohort, tenure, and usage patterns to find who's leaving and when. Early-tenure churn points to onboarding issues; late-tenure churn suggests value erosion.

In practice

A fitness app saw CRR drop from 85% to 78% after adding new workout types. The new content overwhelmed the home screen, and existing users couldn't find their saved workouts. Restoring a "My Workouts" quick-access tab recovered retention to 87%.

Illustrative scenario — a representative composite, not a specific company.

Sources

E-Loyalty: Your Secret Weapon on the Web (5% retention → 25–95% profit) — Bain & Company / HBR (2000)

You might also want to track

Customer Churn Rate

Percentage of customers who leave. Critical insight: 5% monthly churn compounds to 46% annual churn.

Frustration Score

A composite score measuring user frustration signals during a session, derived from rage clicks, dead clicks, error encounters, and navigation reversals.

Session Score

A composite 0–100 score measuring whether sessions are deep and engaged or shallow and bouncy, derived from bounce rate, average duration, pages per session, and session-level frustration.