There is a lot of data collected but deriving insights from its relations can give out valuable information. Customer health score gathers all the significant data of customers and analyzes the future behavior for a predictable time. Measure customer health scores to know how your customers are performing in real time.
If you wonder, is this astrology? It’s certainly not! It is based upon the metrics which the business cares about. Churn seemed daunting in the past, especially to know suddenly when customers are leaving. Time isn’t the same, it is now possible to know beforehand and all it asks is the right data to get what you need to know.
That’s just about one part of the customer’s journey. Likewise one can find up-selling opportunities by analyzing the customer health score. For every action of the customers, there is an impact that is represented in the customer health score. This score is put on the grading scale for various segments which makes it easier to take insights for the next actions.
Significantly changing from red to green, allowing the customer success teams to know the status of the customer relationship with the product, which gives them insights to enhance it better over time.
Tip: Calculating a perfect customer health score for SaaS
Before stepping into measuring one, it’s important to know why it is used. On a general note, business uses customer health score for reasons like,
- To find out the product power users– The ones who are most engaged are the ones who put in more revenue in the stream.
Read more: Grow Your Recurring Revenue Through Customer Success
- Expansion opportunities– Growth is vital when the customers upgrade to different subscriptions and purchase other products from the product options.
- To identify churn– Look further into what seems like daunting! Priorly knowing the chances of leaving customers, gives enough time to take action to retain them.
Pro tip: Three most effective ways to measure churn and increase retention rate.
- Know the failure patterns– Ultimately business needs to know which effort is working and what isn’t to revise the plans and to improve the product.
Read about: Common mistakes CSMs do while setting up Account Health!
So here are the ways to measure the customer health score:
What’s the outcome you expect?
What do you want the health score to give insights when you look at it? Whether it is churn or renewals or up-selling opportunities? Inputs for the outcome depend on the needs of the business. Measure customer health score based on the outcome that you want to derive actionable insights.
Define the segments
The health score is more associated with the needs of the customer. Segmenting the customers based on different subscription plans, or the industries and even use cases aids in understanding their needs clearly. And when a health score is applied to each of the segments, it gives better insights to know how to serve them right. More simply, catering attention accordingly gets easier.
You might want to know: Customer Segmentation in b2b SaaS drives user engagement
Figure out the actions that impact the customer’s health score
It’s those actions from the customers that change the score and need to be measured. There is no perfect behavior exhibited to just calculate one metric. Because customers aren’t alike. One can consider,
- Features are mostly accessed in product usage.
- The number of users utilizing the product.
- How many times do they use the product?
- Resource utilization
- Usage of chat options.
- Support tickets
- Upgrades or add ons
Know more: Drawbacks of product analytics tools and how data-driven CS helps
The health score value is assigned to an action
Customer health score = Overall action value1 + Overal action value 2 +…… Overall action value n.
Why we are evaluating the user action is because of its impact on the outcome you considered. If the focus is to understand churn through the health score, actions like product usage, time spent on the product, frequency of the usage of the product matters altogether and all the individual actions have different weightage depending on the impact itself on the outcome.
Firstly consider the set of actions that have a crucial impact on the outcome, and the persona of a user, to assign it to a value. For illustration, the actions such as feature usage have a higher impact over resource utilization and get higher value over the other.
Let’s say Feature usage gets 10 points and resource utilization is 5 points.
Secondly, measure the number of times those actions occurred. So the feature usage may be 10 times and the resource utilization is 5 times.
Thirdly, measure the overall action value by multiplying the number of occurrences and the value of the action.
That brings us to a 10 * 10 = 100 health score for the feature usage and 5 * 5 = 25 for resource utilization. So all the actions need not be equally valued but cumulatively all the actions will weigh in to impact the outcome and that’s why a single health score fails over the customer health score that every contributing action.
Finally, it’s not just about one action but the cumulative actions, so add all the overall action values. The resulting value is the customer health score for a user as expressed by the formulae above.
Don’t forget to set the rules for the game! If the actions are not frequently performed, they must ring some bells! That is risk alerts in technical terms.
Tip: The Customer Health Score that can bring in predictability
Setting up customer health scale
Wonder how that red, yellow, and green scale appears? Based on the customer health score, set the scale and give colors!
- Scores above 100 fall under customers who thrive and can upgrade.
- 71 – 100 is an indication of a healthy customer.
- While 41 – 70 are somewhat healthy.
- 1 – 40 scores are sick whereas negative scores are totally sick and at high risk of churning.
What are your actions to theirs?
So well you know the customer health scores but what was your objective to get that? Remember it all started with the outcome? It ends there!
Was upselling the reason your outcome was based on? If yes, then gauge the customers with customer health scores above 100 to approach and start increasing the revenue. Use Customer Success tech to measure customer health score and apply the data to derive meaningful insights.
Top 6 tools for measuring customer health
Gainsight
The thought leader in the industry but with a higher expensive implementation for delivering customer success is customer cloud software offering various solutions for customer success. From a glance at the health score to the user engagement, from analyzing customer experience to finding selling opportunities, is covered.
| Pros | Cons |
| It has a sophisticated data designer and rule engines to unwittingly handle the shortcomings to drive changes. | Handling multiple relationships for an admin is a bit time intensive. |
| Again the flexibility in the rules engine allows connecting vivid data sources to derive insights from the customer data. | Sponsor tracking is off the lane at times. |
| Connecting vivid data sources to derive insights from the customer data. | Current configurations are complicated to comprehend by a new admin user unless a guide helps them through. |
| A collaborative platform that is proactive to automatically track customer health while ensuring to keep the records of all the interactions that contributed to measure customer health score. | Has some nuances that need additional clarification in regards to the administration |
| Top-rated features are dynamic customer health scoring, effective KPI tracking via the reports, and its scalability. | The tool is development-heavy and often needs an admin from Gainsight to deal with issues. |
| The first value delivery takes quite a long time to accomplish as it has a long onboarding process. |
Price:
It is available with the sales team.
CustomerSuccessBox
An outcome driving software powered by AI is for all the B2B SaaS businesses to be a part of the proactive culture. Best known for its customer health score that looks into 5 aspects to monitor, such as product adoption health, relationship health, financial health, service health, and external factors.
The software indulges to deliver consistent onboarding, product adoption that is less time-intensive, maximizes customer retention, lowers churn, looks out for expansion and upselling opportunities, returns good MRR, and thus increases customer lifetime value.
It handles 2200 events per second to give out accurate customer account health for all the users. Use this tool to measure customer health score and take the next best actionable steps.
| Pros | Cons |
| The only AI-powered software in the market out there that retraces past events and recommends proactive insights to customer success managers. | Embedding video isn’t possible currently but one can add links to direct to the video. |
| All the needed information for an account is in one place. | Lacks a mobile application for accessibility. |
| Allows setting custom automated workflows based on the interactions to efficiently manage accounts. | |
| Sync the Googe calendar and Gmail for effective interaction. | |
| A call recording facility is available to avoid writing logs | |
| Manage amazingly all the accounts with a 360-degree view of them. | |
| Stay in touch with customers using the automated workflow triggering the teams to drive better communication with the customers. | |
| Get visibility to the portfolio with real-time health. | |
| Set priority on the interactions based on the customer health score. |
Price
It starts from 499$/ month and depends on the customer base as well as the plan chosen.
Totango
A promising easy-to-use software with a fluid interface targeting all sizes of businesses to optimize what is called customer engagement. It is most liked for features such as customer segmentation and easy third-party integration. And is disliked for automation features.
| Pros | Cons |
| A comprehensive tool for both the users and the admin. | Only email integration is opted for and has no other tool integrations for better customer communication. |
| Reports run easily and the customer success process is automated using the campaigns. | At times it is easier to implement the logic and yet times it is disastrous to get what you are looking for. |
| To stay on top of the game, the tasks are automated that remind you of the work that needs to be done to drive success every day. | There is a need for creating new tasks every time you build a successful play. |
| Segmenting feature is laid across the product to get a better perspective on the businesses. | For the similarly priced platform, Totango misses on a lot of product features. |
| It has no customization. |
Price
Prices are available with the sales team.
SmartKarrot
For the fast-growing SaaS B2B businesses, this is an actionable platform with an account health intelligence that workout churn and increases expansion in revenue. Predictive guidance in actionable steps is what makes it likable.
| Pros | Cons |
| It has a lot of enterprise-level success management tools, all gathered in one place. | Though it is comprehensive, it is complicated with a learning curve and time elongates for implementation. |
| Visibility to the granular level data is possible with multi-level functionality. | Features are too much that they can overwhelm. |
| Pretty intuitive and detailed to use. | Segmenting among the users that are on a trial period and actual is inefficient. |
| Allows getting information as to what point in time will the users drop by analyzing customer behavior. | Needs technical knowledge for the implementation of the product. |
| Target audiences can be communicated through custom action using multiple channels and allow easy tracking of the events. |
Price
It is available with the sales team.
Custify
A customer success platform with vivid attributes has a 360-degree view available on the account health. Hence, many people like it for its modern and easy-to-navigate UI and also has an option for customizing using add-on features.
| Pros | Cons |
| Simple tasks can be carried out automatically without playbooks. | It doesn’t have a robust dashboard where all the reports are in one place. |
| Alerts and reports are received in the morning to carry out high-touch problems while saving time. | No mobile application and has scalability issues. |
| Features like tasks and alerts are importantly useful. | |
| Other useful features like automation and customer health scores save a lot of CSMs time to understand which user needs attention and also to know regarding their specific issue. |
Price
- Starter plan @ $199 per month
- Standard plan at $499 per month
- Enterprise quotation is with the sales team.
Churnzero
Churnzero, as a Customer Success tool, fights churn. The software aims to deliver businesses an understanding of the customer’s behavior, to check up on the customer health and probabilities of renewals, automating the customer experience with timely touchpoints. What sets it apart is the command center that tells the customer success teams exactly to focus on the exact requirement.
| Pros | Cons |
| Most of the repetitive tasks can be automated. | Health scoring could be better. |
| It makes it easier to visualize the account as a whole and to know the forthcoming tasks associated with them. | Lacks inbuilt functionalities. |
| It ensures to make you work on the right thing at the right times with its powerful automation to deliver the results. | It has no robust reporting capabilities. |
| The notepad to make lists are general and is not segmented to the specific accounts. |
Price
Price is with the sales team.
Summing it up
To get along with the leads, a customer health score is akin. Measure customer health score to assist you in reaching customer success in a shorter period. Why shoot looking at the metrics when it’s at its peak? Set it up now, you’ll need it and you are ready! For a change predict the renewals earlier than later with the customer success software.
Bonus tip: Template to choose Customer Success Platform
