6 Metrics that Help Calculate Your Customer’s Health & the SuccessScore™
For SaaS customer success teams having a 360-degree view of customer health is vital to renewal and expansion success of their customers. Customer success health scoring is also one of the hottest topics on the minds of customer success leaders around the world.
Customer Health Score Challenge—Customer Health Data is Spread Out
The difficulty is that customer health metrics can be spread out across multiple customer systems (ie. CRM, Support Tool, NPS/Survey Tool, Product Usage Tool, Email, Notes), making it difficult to achieve a clear 360-degree view without tons of manual work or even a group of customer data analysts (expensive).
Hot Topic—Customer Health Scoring
Customer success health scoring is a hot topic. You will hear it at customer success conferences, meetups, networking events, and peer mentoring sessions. Everyone is trying to put together a best-in-class customer health scoring strategy that helps to clearly identify success and risk.
How to Get Started with Customer Health Scoring
Customer success health scoring is thought of as the Holy Grail of customer success.
So where do you get started? We will help you below.
In this post, we will cover six customer success health scoring metrics that will help you get started. And we will introduce you to our customer success health scoring framework called SuccessScore™.
6 Customer Success Health Scoring Metrics
Below you will see the six customer success health scoring metrics and the ClientSuccess SuccessScore—our customer success health scoring framework that allows you to bring in customer data from multiple customer systems to build a weighted health score. Our SuccessScore framework allows you to clearly see the individual metric groups, overall score, and trends that are calculated daily of a customer account.
Now let’s talk about six metrics to help you get started calculating customer health:
1. Product Usage
As a general rule of thumb, people tend to use the products and/or services that they like and ignore the ones they don’t. This is especially true when it comes to SaaS products and services. Measuring product usage can help alert your team to issues within your account across various areas such as training, educational resources, and even product enhancements. Learn more about how product leaders are delivering customer success in this ebook.
If you see customer product usage slipping across all users, it’s probably a sign to re-evaluate your engagement strategy and go in to ask targeted questions about where they’re seeing issues. If it’s just a few key users or decision-makers that are trending down, you can reach out to them specifically to uncover the root cause.
2. Customer Sentiment
We get it – trying to quantify something as ambiguous as satisfaction or happiness can be difficult. Putting numbers up against how ‘happy’ people seem can come off as more ambiguous than customer health as a whole. But, for most customer success teams, customer sentiment is more of a ‘gut feeling’ metric, one that is constantly updated and tweaked based on feedback.
Even if you’re dealing with a single customer account, customer sentiment metrics can be changed on a daily basis or after every single touchpoint. Is your customer content with the product? Are they having issues with onboarding a new service? Are there lingering questions about a renewal that are becoming contentious? These factors all go into calculating customer sentiment, which is why the metric as a whole can change at any moment – just like actual human emotions. A popular customer sentiment metrics tracked in customer success is NPS® (Net Promoter Score®).
3. Customer Advocacy
Another great sign of a healthy customer account is the willingness to talk to others about their experience with a vendor. Whether they’re talking to peers in a casual conversation or signing on to be part of a customer success story, advocates are the unsung heroes of both customer success and marketing. How willing your customers are to talk to others about their successes is a clear sign of whether or not they’re happy with your product and service. This also gives your internal team another strong goal to work towards if a customer isn’t currently a reference or advocate.
4. Customer Engagement
Customer engagement metrics are focused on your personal interactions and communications (emails, phone call, meetings) with your customers and key contacts. For this example, we will define engagement as the days since last communication whether by email, phone, and face-to-face. ClientSuccess has a customer engagement tool to help you track your customer engagements in real-time. Customer success managers and leaders love the insight it gives them around customer engagement. Think of this customer success health metric as how often you communicate with a customer account.
5. Customer Relationship
The customer relationship metric is about how strong your relationship is with your customer account. There is a customer success management strategy called going high and wide. Are you building the right relationships with the right people? If not, you might be surprised come renewal time. Having the right relationships with the right people can help you expand products and services. Expansion is a sign of a solid customer relationship. Don’t forget this next point. The best relationships come with positive results or ROI, which moves us to our last metric of the six—Customer ROI.
6. Customer ROI
We live by this simple concept. Relationships in business are great, but relationships without ROI or results are destined to fail or not renew. The customer ROI metric is all about helping your clients achieve a positive ROI with your product or service. This is really important to the CEO, CFO, and the board. If your customers earn 15 dollars for every dollar they spend with your solution, you have a huge win and you have achieved customer ROI. Customer ROI is also a great way to help your customer success teams focus on the right work that drives an ROI and not just product adoption/usage.
Summary and Application
We have introduced you to six customer success metrics to help you get started defining your customer success health measurement strategy. We have also introduced you to the ClientSuccess SuccessScore—our customer success health scoring framework that allows you to bring in customer data from multiple customer systems to build a weighted health score. If your refer to the SuccessScore screenshot above, you will see that the client health score as of today is 69.3 out of 100 points. As a customer success manager the SuccessScore gives me the right insights to be proactive with this customer account.
If you would like to see a demo of the ClientSuccess SuccessScore health scoring framework and how it can save you time, headache, and make you grow more accounts, you can request a 30-minute demo here.
eBooks:
Ultimate Guide to SaaS Customer Success Metrics
Customer Success as a Culture: Customer Success Leaders Edition
Blog Posts:
3 Reasons Why Customer Health is LIke a Gallon of Milk
Three Keys to Understand Customer Health
Learn more about how ClientSuccess can help your company develop a strong Customer Success methodology and strategy with easy-to-use customer success software by requesting a 30-minute demo.