What is a Customer Health Score and Why Should You Care?
A customer health score is a single metric that summarizes the strength of your commercial relationships. This 1-100 index considers usage, revenue expansion, support burden, and loyalty indicators across your client base over time to determine whether customers are happy, at risk, or primed to churn.
Much like your net promoter score, customer satisfaction index, or other experience benchmarks, it provides a high-level snapshot of engagement. However, unlike siloed surveys, a customer health score algorithmically combines multiple data streams for greater sophistication. Leading indicators are weighted, scored, segmented, and rolled up into three “health” buckets—healthy, at risk, unhealthy—providing actionable insight.
So why should you care about monitoring this index? In today’s recurring revenue paradigm, rivals are constantly gunning for your best accounts. Moreover, it costs 5x more to acquire new logo compared to nurturing an existing relationship. The health score quantifies early warnings that signal attrition risk and unpacks cross-sell potential. Companies leveraging this intelligence, such as cloud software giant Workday, have realized:
- 33% faster growth
- 5-10x higher win rates for renewals/expansions
- 15-20% greater lifetime value per account
When deployed properly across Technology, Customer Success and Executive teams, customer health Paves the path to predictable expansion, retention and revenue. This handbook details everything you need to know to implement an effective customer health score, fuel sticky experiences and maximize growth.
The Anatomy of a Customer Health Score
Successful health scoring methodologies incorporate a balanced mix of performance metrics spanning relationship depth, product usage, account expansion and support need. Here are 10 core ingredients for an accurate snapshot:
Usage Frequency
Monthly or quarterly website, login or feature adoption activity levels demonstrate engagement.
Account Spend
Tracking increases or decreases over time. Growth in spend shows expanded value realization and cement trust.
Support Tickets
Volume of negative technical issues or complaints lodged that require resolution. Too many burdens the relationship.
Adoption of New Features
Eagerness to use newly launched capabilities. Indicates stickiness and comfort maturing capabilities.
Payment Behavior
Timeliness of payments. Lateness predicts risk of churn.
Relationship History
Length and depth of entire customer journey so far, including milestones or expansion projects completed over time. Newer customers need more nurturing.
External Signals
Reviews, referrals, social mentions. The ultimate endorsement.
% Renewal Rate
Rolling metric indicating long term commitment to usage. Declines flags issues.
Days to Close Expansion Deal
The faster a renewal or upsell deal closes the healthier the rapport.
Likelihood to Recommend
Willingness to refer others in their network or write online endorsements signals high satisfaction.
Now, not all metrics matter for every business. SaaS adoption curves, buying journeys and usage rhythms differ wildly across verticals. But incorporating a tailored blend covering usage, revenue impact, support burden and loyalty paints a comprehensive picture.
Building Your Customer Health Score
Once you‘ve honed in on the right inputs, here is a step-by-step process for configuring your algorithm:
1. Assign a Weight to Each Metric
Allocate a percentage based on the level of influence each has on customer satisfaction and loyalty. For example, timely payments may determine 50% of the score, while adoption of new capabilities is just 10%.
2. Define a Scoring Scale
Set up a consistent numeric scale for each metric – Such as 1-10 or using thresholds.
3. Calculate Individual Metric Performance
Tally and evaluate actual performance for each distinct customer over a set time period – such as monthly.
4. Multiple By Weight, Then Sum into Total Score
Multiply metric performance by allocated weight percentage, then total up into final 1-100 customer health score.
5. Segment Score into Health Buckets
Categorize each customer as healthy (70-100), at risk (30-70) or unhealthy (<30) based on score thresholds.
6. Visualize & Trend Over Time
Chart customer health in a CRM system or dashboard to enable tracking versus goals and quickly spot downgrades.
Implementing a clear, repeatable calculation process is essential for score integrity and maximum business impact.
Customer Health Score Best Practices
Now that the methodology is clear, here are a few real-world examples and lessons learned:
Reviews Platform Uses 7 Inputs
A leading software review company combines product usage, account expansion, likelihood to renew and external signals such as referrals and badges earned into their customer health framework. By balancing commercial insights with community engagement their retention rates have climbed 10 percentage points.
eComm Site Tiers External Signals
An online retailer boosted repeat purchase rates by factoring in referral rates and social mentions. They tier social recommendations as 3x more influential than standard referrals when tabulating scores given the credibility factor.
Avoid Overweighting New Feature Adoption
Unless launching cutting edge capabilities every month, resist over-rotating on this temporary signal. Usage and payments carry more weight.
In each case, the key is tying customer health directly back to the core drivers of growth and profitability for your particular business model using a tailored balance of signals.
5 Strategies for Bolstering Customer Health
Monitoring is only half the battle. Consistently strengthening engagement across your book of business is critical for reducing churn, sustaining renewals and forging loyal brand ambassadors. Here are 5 proven tactics for moving the needle:
1. Map Journeys to Pinpoint At-Risk Moments
Understand experience pathways across healthy and at-risk segments. Locate moments of friction, such as during onboarding or a platform upgrade, that consistently degrade health scores.
2. Craft Journey Stage Campaigns to Nurture
Define targeted mini-campaigns for each step of the journey to educate, engage and support – whether day 30 adoption or quarterly renewals. Reach out via email, chatbots, in-app guides or human touchpoints.
3. Incent Usage and Referrals
Gamification is your friend. Reward engagement milestones or consumer referrals with status badges, loyalty points or access to gated content. Recognize top advocates publicly.
4. Make Support Resources Contextually Accessible
80% of users prefer self-service help documentation. Ensure contextualized articles or community discussions are easy discoverable in-journey to deflect tickets.
5. Automate Reconciliation Triggers
When scores drop – such as from a detailed negative review or wave of similar tickets – automatically dispatch reconciliation messages to rebuild trust.
While tactics should align to your vertical, taking an organized approach to managing experiences based on segment health and gaps will steadily cultivate stickiness over time.
The Revenue Impact of Customer Health
For the 32% of companies currently monitoring health scores, the business impact is undeniable. Here‘s a snapshot of metrics on the rise:
From reduced customer acquisition costs to faster expansion cycles and less operational fire drills, gains flow straight to the bottom line.
Moreover, workers reap ancillary returns. With executive leadership armed with customer insights for every big product, pricing or roadmap decision, teams spend less time debating about the “right” choice. Tech priorities become firmly anchored on driving customer usage and satisfaction. Everyone rallies around the same North Star metric built on feedback.
Key Takeaways Around Adopting Customer Health Scores
Here’s what to remember when implementing your own methodology:
- Concisely measures relationship strength and satisfaction
- Predict churn risks early and maximizes lifetime value
- Blend usage, revenue, burden and loyalty data
- Assign metric weights, define a scale, calculate over time
- Map journeys, nurture by stage, automate outreach
- Aligns organizations around customer centricity
While launching your program takes concerted data integration, platform building, executive buy-in and change management, the long tail benefits make it well worth the effort. Start reaping higher growth and profitability through strengthened customer relationships today. Your bottom line will thank you.
