Customer Health Score
The Customer Health Score is an extremely important metric for evaluating the health of a company’s accounts and ensuring customer success.
A medical check-up allows us to carry out a series of tests that give us important information to prevent diseases, as well as establish the detection of the main risk factors.
In the case of clients, when we talk about client health, we refer to the variables that must be periodically reviewed and allow us to establish which clients are:
- Healthy: To get a better prediction about renewals and upsells.
- Unhealthy : To evaluate the possible risks of dropping out of the same.
Both points lead us to an action plan and make the Customer Health Score (or customer health index ) a powerful instrument that lets us know where we are with our customers and determine where we want to take them .
This is where many of the questions begin like: What makes a customer healthy? How do I measure the health of my clients? Why worry about customer health? Let’s see then:
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What makes a healthy customer?
A healthy customer is one who, thanks to his product and / or service, is on the way to successfully achieve his business objectives, therefore he appropriates the product, meets his expectations, becomes an expert in its use and also has an index satisfaction high.
We all want to have these types of clients, but this does not happen with a magic wand or by chance, the work is daily.
The way to calculate customer health varies and is almost unique for each company, as it will depend on the metrics that business criteria are considered most valuable.
How to measure the Customer Health Score?
Before the how, we have to define the what, that is, what are those signals that will warn you long before the client leaves, this means that we find an intention, a thought, a perception that can lead him to do it. There are some points that can serve as a reference to build the customer health dashboard:
1. Appropriation
Which has to do with two factors, the adoption of the product and its percentage of use. Is the customer getting the most out of the product’s functionalities?
2. Enabling
This point is key because a client who invests in their training shows signs that they are interested in being autonomous, in incorporating best practices and strengthening their knowledge.
3. Support
The frequency of use of this resource also gives us interesting data and focused feedback to establish action plans with the client. Do you call to ask the same questions? Does it denote a lack of knowledge or autonomy about the product? Does it have more failures than expected?
4. Satisfaction
Customer success and customer experience are deeply linked – when the two work together, better results are achieved.
The measurement of the NPS ( Net Promoter Score ), as well as the metrics related to the value interactions with the customer are key information to determine the positive association with the brand and the perception through the customer journey from their onboarding process.
5. Financial health
Customer payment behavior. A client who pays his invoices on time is a client who does not want to have any kind of problem with his product or service and will not run out of budget to make the payment.
Remember that you are looking for results that allow you to mitigate risks and take action, so the suggestion so that you can model it in your organization is to be specific in the points that you are going to take as reference as “vital signs” for renewal and identify how you can use this dashboard in daily work.
Maintain a simple and easy-to-determine measurement system that leads to visibility of the health status of customers and that in turn is flexible so that it can be refined if necessary with new relevant data for the purpose of improving your strategy of customer success.
Color codes, traffic light or numeric, based on values within ranges, are the most commonly used for these scoring systems. In the market there are many free and paid tools that allow you to create the control panel, make sure you can use them with competence so that practically the client‘s success team has this resource at hand.
3 keys to the Customer Health Score
The process of establishing a client health dashboard requires significant effort but the short-term benefits are fully worth it as a source of the client’s strategy for success.
Motivation, measurement, and monitoring build the foundation for this practice and it surely becomes a key tool for sales, renewal, marketing, and customer success teams.
1-Motivation
The purpose is what makes sense of this data leading the account team to observation and reflection to take action. Without action, the board would be of no use.
If the client is in good health, then action towards renewal and growth. If it does not have it, action towards improvement plans to remedy that state.
2-Measurement
The metric information must be efficient, sufficient and timely. Metrics outside of these three parameters make the customer health dashboard obsolete. Do not expect perfection, take this data to prepare yourself on the court from another position and promote better management of the account team and the actors of your company that interact with the client.
3-Monitoring
Evaluate progress periodically, you know the rhythm more than anyone, so be clear about the checkpoints to avoid surprises that lead to attrition and use the information to predict future customer behavior.
conclusion
Keep in mind that customer success is something that never ends, and that towards it, the control panel becomes a powerful instrument where you will have an initial diagnosis on a single page that will make it easier for you to focus not only on remediation but on where generate value and anticipate with your customers.
