Elevating account management by adopting Customer Health score
The Roadmap to Sustainable Growth
In the dynamic landscape of business, customer health scores play a pivotal role in determining the trajectory of your company. A strong customer health score signals increased adoption, consistent upsell opportunities, and customers who have the potential to become advocates for your brand, often without solicitation. Conversely, trending toward a poor customer health score is an early warning sign of potential churn, accompanied by negative customer stories and more dire consequences. Successful organizations use Customer Health to increase customer retention, improve customer satisfaction and boost revenue growth.
Understanding Customer Health Scores
At its core, a customer health score is a metric used predominantly by account management teams to evaluate whether customers are thriving or at risk. While there doesn’t exist an industry standard for generating health scores and various implementations differ on the input parameters used and the weights assigned to them. But this shouldn’t stop an organization that cares about its customers from using health scores. Like NPS, absolute scores are somewhat helpful, but the real value is in tracking the trend of the score and using it to take appropriate actions. If used diligently customer health scores can assist product and account management teams in accurately assessing a customer’s likelihood to grow, renew, or churn.
Metrics for Customer Health Scores
While there could be certain organization-specific metrics based on your unique context, here are some fundamental metrics that most organizations track:
- Product usage and feedback
- ROI realization
- Account growth
- Length of customer engagement
- Support usage
- Survey results
- Account manager feedback
- Overall relationship
Limitations of Traditional Platforms
While many platforms offer Customer Health as a feature, traditional scoring models often use a three-color coding system: green for healthy customers, yellow for those in the middle, and red for unhappy customers. However, this approach has its limitations. Not all greens are created equal, and the scale can be subjective, depending on who inputs the information. Additionally, it can be challenging to discern why a customer has earned a particular score, which is crucial for crafting effective strategies.
Also, one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to customer health scores. They should ideally be customized for an organization based on the relative importance of the different factors. Furthermore, traditional platforms may not be able to provide insights into the reasons why a customer’s health score is low.
Intelo - The modern account management platform
At Intelo we have taken an innovative approach to customer health where we provide customers the flexibility of choosing which of the parameters are relevant for them as well as choosing the relative importance of them in the context of their business. We also don’t limit ourselves to just reporting on Customer Health scores. Our AI engine Intelo analyses interactions to identify insights and help improve customer health. Our insights are used to identify and mitigate customer churn risks, increase customer usage and engagement, and improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. For example, for one of our clients, we analyzed more than 14K interactions to identify over 80 insights helping identify hard-to-find signals as well as risks which played a vital role in improving customer health by 17% within 3 months of implementation!
Conclusion
In conclusion, evaluating, monitoring, and improving customer health scores are indispensable for the success of any company. They provide insights into customer well-being, help prioritize efforts, and enable data-driven decisions. By adopting the right tools and customizing scores to align with the organization’s context, businesses can navigate towards sustained growth and customer loyalty.