Customers in the contemporary age are becoming increasingly conscious of the variety of experiences they need before purchasing. To raise your customer health score, you must view customer health as a logical, well-thought-out problem.  

An assessment of this nature should not be viewed as a hurried response to anything you do. It involves creating a detailed picture of your customers’ interactions with your company. 

This involves learning what matters most to each customer. This not only assists in long-term problem solving but also provides you with insight into how people feel about your company. 

Customer health cannot be measured in a solitary, simple area but can be divided into five key categories, including service quality, cost, and product packaging. Find out what your clients want from your company and work to provide it. The outcomes, this way, will be quick and, consequently, long-lasting.  

A customer success health score is built using a vast array of variables. Since tracking every customer is not feasible, hiring a customer health score expert is the next best option. To develop excellent customer experiences, consultants have worked hard to assist businesses in recognizing the magnitude of customer scores. 

A high score is equal to making the customer delighted. The objective is to develop a strong customer base. The only thing a company can do is prioritize the client before examining other areas for improvement. 

How do we perfectly improve customer health scores? 

Customer health rating is essentially all about making smart assumptions. A crucial query is left to be discussed: How do you make those predictions near to perfect? We will talk about that in this part of the post.  

So, without further delay, let us get started with the pointers. 

Decide on an objective that you wish to accomplish using the customer success health score 

The foundation of your customer health score is determined by the objective your team is aiming for using the customer success health score. Do you want to lower churn? Boost renewal rates? Increase the likelihood of upsells? The entire list? The initial step is critical because it will establish the basic behavioral signals to look at later, so choose the outcome that matters most to your team.

For instance, you should probably monitor customer engagement levels in specific product features to increase upsell opportunities to determine which ones they value the most.

You must first explain your scoring system to your customer success managers and the rest of the company. Ensure your customer health rating system is simple to comprehend and use by all team members will help your customer support professionals identify which clients may require further attention.

You should also monitor relationship signals with the customer account to determine whether they would trust you enough to follow through if you suggested buying a new feature.

Every organization will choose this result differently. The possibility that a client would renew their membership is perhaps the outcome chosen by one team. They have discovered that customers are not renewing their subscriptions after the first year and want to solve that.

Another team may decide to focus on the chance that a customer may leave after noticing a high churn rate. This choice will be strongly influenced by the circumstances surrounding your company and your team’s objectives.

Having a pulse on your customers is among the first things this choice demands. You won’t be able to precisely picture your customers’ health without knowing their purchase cycles, how they interact with your product, and the motivations behind your team’s chosen target outcome.

Zero in on the customer health score metrics that you want to track 

Since there is no predefined structure for calculating customer health scores, you must carefully consider which metrics are important.

Asana, for instance, utilizes an Account Health Score metric to assess a team’s performance, location, and payment history. Pendo keeps track of how many people come, how long they stay on the app, and how often they use its essential features.

Determining which of your monitored metrics is the best sign of success and customer retention is crucial. Hence, it may be necessary to examine the full customer journey, from onboarding to customer churn.

There are eight crucial metric categories that you want to track:

• Adoption
• Advocacy
• Customer Journey
• Engagement
• Invoice Payments
• Relationships
• Sentiment
• Usage

Here is our take on each of these metrics:

Adoption

This metric evaluates the scope and depth of the customer’s product utilization. Are they implementing the product as intended based on use cases and outcomes? Do they use a module, or do they use the entire platform? Are they leveraging the additional modules or solutions they are paying for?

Advocacy

A positive sign is when a customer offers to act as a good reference for you, sends you recommendations, participates in your events, or speaks highly about you in their neighborhood. Of course, that also needs to be noted if they aren’t. As a good indicator of the strength of a partnership, your customer’s desire to take part in these kinds of advocacy efforts can be used to affect your customer’s health score.

Customer Journey

For some organizations, it’s critical to comprehend how the customer is progressing through the customer journey and how long it takes for them to reach crucial stages and milestones. Are they, for instance, stuck at a certain point in their journey? Or are they reaching the important checkpoints along the way? Some businesses also consider a client’s lifetime value (LTV) or the time they have been a customer (customer tenure) when determining how healthy they are.

Engagement

This metric will indicate your customers’ involvement with your business or team. You can gauge how long it has been since the last meeting or chat or how they interact with your content. Keep in mind that the KPIs should be tailored to your company.

Invoice Payments

This is a nudge to every finance professional. But truly, it’s a bad sign if your customer often misses payments or refuses to pay their obligations in full. Perhaps the credit card they had on file expired or was rejected.

It is crucial to consider this depending on your subscription and payment conditions. Or perhaps the customer stopped paying because they didn’t like your solution. You can get excellent customer health indications by checking payment status and trend information.

Relationships

Every leader gives their customer success team the assignment to cultivate connections efficiently.  Avoid being simple, and don’t be so silly as to think there’s only one person internally making all the decisions.

You might want to gauge the strength and number of these connections; for instance, how many executives do you know, and when was the last time you spoke? You might wish to monitor how each customer interacts with your company. Ultimately, you need to determine what you want to measure in this situation before going back into the how.

Sentiment

Measuring and keeping track of consumer sentiment is essential for understanding how people feel about you and your company. You can get a sense of sentiment from survey tools, customer service ticketing systems, marketing platforms, etc., but getting feedback from various people is crucial.

NPS is a widely used industry survey that serves as a barometer of sentiment, but it’s crucial to monitor and track both data-driven and human-driven insights to ensure a comprehensive picture of how your consumers perceive you and the partnership.

Usage

This metric will help you assess how regularly or how many users your product gets from the consumer. To ensure that all purchased licenses are assigned and used, you should measure license utilization if you sell licenses.

Give ratings to the customer success health score metrics you are tracking 

You need to implement customer health score weighting after you obtain your datasets. Keep a close check on data patterns to ensure your initial hypotheses about which metrics are relevant or associated, resulting in an appropriate projection of customer attrition. 

Which measures are more vital to a company, and which ones are less helpful in analyzing account health?

In the example given above, you might give a lower weighting to the customer participation rate with user community forums while prioritizing NPS, CSAT, and service management indicators as important variables in the calculation of customer health.

You are free to scale the weighting system in any way that makes sense to you. The scores from your metrics could be awarded a plus or minus value on a scale between 0 and 100.

Devise a better internal communication strategy 

The varied perceptions from people within your company are one of the main pitfalls when first implementing customer health scores. For instance, the value of a number and color will be perceived differently.  A 99 out of 100 would immediately have a negative meaning for the perfectionists in your firm.

Colors could have unintended meanings depending on where you are in the globe. Sales may see an opportunity when finance sees a tragedy. Ensure you include a few slides on the fundamentals of customer health scores in every internal QBR, sales meeting, and internal forum.

Obviously, we do not devote enough effort to doing this at the beginning of a launch or change.

Concentrate on your calculations 

Improving a customer success health score is like making a trial and error. New requirements and behaviors must be noted as your customer base expands over time. Ideally, you are well past the point of trial and error and have access to data analytics support that aligns with your primary use cases. It’s also critical to understand that data evolves, and trends always emerge.

For several reasons, the calculations you made when you originally launched it might need to be reviewed. It is strongly advised that you review your categories, weights, and measurements with the helpful assistance of your data analytics tools.

Concluding Thoughts 

It is the job of customer success teams to improve the customer health score continually. To ensure you accurately measure and respond to user behavior, utilize your customer health scorecard as a guiding template. 

If used properly, your customer health score can aid in user retention, MRR growth, and accomplishing your company’s objectives. 

Follow the tips provided in this blog, and you will be able to maximize the potential of your customer success health score and take it to the next level of success for your customer success team. 

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