There is a number that predicts customer churn more accurately than NPS, correlates with expansion revenue more reliably than product usage frequency, and influences support costs more directly than any self-service initiative. Almost no company measures it.
That number is time to proficiency — the elapsed time between a customer's first login and the moment they can independently accomplish the tasks they purchased your product to do.
What Proficiency Actually Means
Proficiency is not the same as activation. Activation — the "aha moment" that product-led growth teams obsess over — is important, but it is a single event. The customer sees the value. That is the beginning, not the end.
Proficiency is the point where a customer can use your product without relying on anyone else. They do not need to search the help center for basic operations. They do not open a support ticket for routine tasks. They do not ask their colleague how to find a feature. They can sit down, do their work, and the product fades into the background the way a good tool should.
The difference between activation and proficiency is the difference between test-driving a car and knowing how to drive. The test drive creates excitement. Knowing how to drive creates a daily habit. And habits — not excitement — are what drive retention.
Why Nobody Measures This
The reason time to proficiency is rarely tracked is that it is genuinely hard to measure. Unlike activation, which you can define as a single event ("user created their first workflow"), proficiency is a state — and states are harder to pin down than events.
But hard is not impossible. You can approximate proficiency through behavioral signals:
The customer has used the core features multiple times without triggering help content. Their error rate on common tasks has dropped below a threshold. They have started using features beyond the basics — not because you prompted them, but because they are exploring on their own. Their support tickets, if any, are about advanced use cases rather than fundamental operations.
No single signal defines proficiency, but a cluster of signals creates a reliable proxy. The companies that track these signals — even imperfectly — gain a predictive lens that transforms their understanding of customer health.
The Churn Connection
Here is the pattern I have seen repeatedly: the customers who churn at renewal are not the ones who had a bad experience. They are the ones who never became proficient.
They signed up. They completed onboarding. Maybe they even attended a training webinar. But somewhere between "I have an account" and "I use this product every day without thinking about it," something stalled. They reverted to their old workflow. They used your product for the simplest possible tasks and handled everything else with the tools they already knew.
When renewal time comes, they look at their usage and say, "We're not really getting our money's worth." They are not wrong — they just never reached the point where the product's value exceeded the effort of using it.
This is not a product problem. It is a proficiency problem. The product can do everything they need. They just never learned to use it well enough for that capability to matter.
The Education Intervention
Customer education is the most direct lever for reducing time to proficiency. But not all education is created equal, and the wrong kind can actually slow proficiency down.
Traditional training programs — watch these ten videos, complete this course — optimize for coverage. They try to teach everything the product can do, in sequence, regardless of what the customer actually needs right now. This is like handing someone a 300-page manual when they just want to know how to turn the machine on.
Education that accelerates proficiency is targeted and sequenced around the customer's actual workflow. It answers the question "what does this customer need to do next?" rather than "what should this customer know?"
The distinction matters because proficiency is task-specific, not product-comprehensive. A marketing manager does not need to learn the developer API to become proficient. A system administrator does not need to complete the end-user training. When you force everyone through the same curriculum, you delay proficiency for everyone.
The best customer education programs create persona-based paths that get each type of user to proficiency as quickly as possible, with optional depth for those who want to go further.
The Financial Math
Let me make this concrete. Suppose your product has a $50,000 annual contract, and your average customer takes 90 days to reach proficiency. During those 90 days, the customer is at elevated churn risk, generates more support tickets, and is unlikely to expand.
If your education program can reduce time to proficiency from 90 days to 45 days, you have:
- Halved the high-risk onboarding window
- Reduced the support burden during the most ticket-intensive period
- Created 45 additional days per year where the customer is in a proficient, expansion-ready state
- Made renewal conversations easier because the customer has been productive longer
Multiply that across your customer base and the numbers become significant. A 1% improvement in retention rate on a $100M ARR business is a million dollars. And time to proficiency is one of the strongest predictors of retention.
This is why customer education is not a support function — it is a revenue function. Not because education directly generates revenue, but because it accelerates the state that makes revenue possible: proficiency.
Measuring What Matters
If you want to start tracking time to proficiency, begin with your most common customer persona. Define three to five tasks that represent baseline proficiency for that persona. Instrument those tasks in your product analytics. Then measure the elapsed time from first login to the point where the customer can perform all of those tasks independently.
You will immediately see variance — some customers reach proficiency in two weeks, others take six months, and some never get there at all. That variance is the most actionable data your customer success team has ever seen, because it tells you exactly who needs help, what kind of help they need, and how urgently they need it.
Time to proficiency will not appear on your quarterly earnings slide. It will never be as clean as ARR or as familiar as NPS. But it will tell you the truth about your customer relationships in a way those metrics never can.
Start measuring it. The results will change how you think about everything from onboarding to renewal.
