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Burn the churn

3 Min Read

Refresher course: What are customer health scores?

You know how critical customer health is and you’re always striving to improve.

(Maybe you’ve even signed up for our 8-week customer health challenge — and you’re ready to burn the churn!)

But wait. How exactly does a customer health score work again?

Customer health scores are important for understanding your customers, preventing churn, and landing more renewals. But why?

It’s time for a short refresher course on customer health scores and why they’re so important.  

Let’s dive in.

What’s a Customer Health Score?

A customer health score is a value that indicates whether a customer is healthy or at-risk for churn. 

Customer health scoring is the process of distilling meaningful customer data into a simple score to evaluate a customer’s overall engagement and satisfaction with a company and its product or service. 

Using this score, Customer Success teams can reliably predict the likelihood that a customer will renew, churn or upgrade their product or service. Yes, that’s right — predict

Here’s why that’s vital.

Why is a Customer Health Score important?

Customer health scoring is critical to the long-term success of any Customer Success team. 

Why? 

Because this score helps CS teams reliably assess the future state of a relationship with a given customer. With this information, companies can improve the way they interact with customers to build better relationships and a better customer experience.

By proactively monitoring health scores with a digital-led strategy, CSMs can identify and address potentially unhappy customers – before renewal time rolls around – to take steps to get the customer back on the right path and ultimately avoid churn.

Health scores can also easily enable CSMs to identify their most successful customers — the ones who are most likely to be open to upsell conversations and the most willing to become customer references, provide testimonials, or participate in case studies. 

Not only does this increase retention of current customers, but it also promotes the acquisition of potential new customers. 

Types of Customer Health Score Models

When it comes to choosing your customer health score model, know this:

Customer health scoring is unique to each industry, each company, and sometimes even to each customer. There’s no one-size-fits-all way to approach it.

You’ll want to consider key factors like company size, industry, product type, business model, community engagement, and more. 

When scoring customer health, companies use a variety of different systems, including:

  • Traffic light (red, yellow, green) system
  • Assigning points 0-100
  • Determining rankings like A, B, C, or D

Whatever approach you choose, remember that the best customer health score is the one that works for you.

Final Thoughts

Now more than ever in today’s uncertain market, predictive scoring is critical. We call it the new standard of customer health: how customer health models have evolved to the current economic climate.

In sum, customer health scores can help you take the guesswork out of understanding the state of your customers. It’s a clear, measurable way to assess customer satisfaction in a scalable way so you can focus on preventing churn and landing renewals.

We hope that this short refresher course will help you take the next step to improve your customer health.

So what’s the next step? Join our customer health challenge for 8 weeks of content, tools, and strategies to get from red to green.

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