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When and How to Update Your Customer Health Scores

March 9, 2023
February 2, 2023
February 2, 2023
|
16
min.

When running a successful customer success program, customer health scores are key. They provide insight into customer satisfaction, engagement, and the risk of churn – all essential metrics for any business.

But as customer behaviors and needs change over time, the once effective metrics may no longer accurately predict customer satisfaction and engagement.

That’s why staying current on customer health scores and identifying when they are outdated is important.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss how to keep track of your customer health scores, what metrics you should be tracking, how to update them as needed, and best practices for using them in your customer success strategy.

We’ll also explore how to use net promoter score (NPS), customer effort score (CES), survey results, product usage data, and other metrics to measure and improve your customers' health scores.

By the end of this post, you will better understand how to identify when your customer health scores are out of date, as well as what steps you can take to ensure that you have an accurate picture of your customer's satisfaction levels.

So let’s get started!

The Importance of Accurate Customer Health Scores

Dynamic Scoring Dashboard in Parative

Customer health scores are a critical component of understanding and optimizing customer success.

Accurate customer health scores give business owners a better view of customers’ satisfaction levels and engagement while helping identify the churn risk.

By regularly monitoring customer health scores, businesses can identify potential issues in advance and take action to prevent customer attrition.

Additionally, these scores provide insight into customers' readiness for expansion and open up opportunities for upsells or cross-sell.

When it comes to customer success, having accurate customer health scores is absolutely essential.

Here’s why:

1. Understanding Your Customers and Their Needs

Accurate customer health scores provide a snapshot of your customer’s satisfaction and engagement so businesses can understand their needs more accurately.

Customer health scores help with everything from product usage to onboarding, segmentation, engagement, experience, and retention - all critical aspects of the customer journey and, ultimately for a successful customer success program.

2. Identifying Potential Issues Early On

By monitoring customers’ health scores continuously, businesses have a better chance of identifying potential issues early on – before they become full-blown problems that result in churn.

This allows you to quickly adjust product offerings or services to keep customers satisfied and engaged with your product or service.

3. Unlocking Opportunities for Expansion

Accurate customer health scores don’t just allow you to identify negative trends early on – they also help unlock opportunities for growth by providing insight into those customers who may be ready for expansion.

Through upsells or cross-sells, businesses can leverage existing customer relationships to increase revenue while simultaneously deepening loyalty with current customers.

4. Developing Your Customer Health Scorecard

To get the most out of accurate customer health scores, businesses should develop their own custom scorecards explicitly tailored to their products/services and industry.

A good scorecard should include metrics such as NPS (Net Promoter Score), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction), usage patterns, average response time from the Customer Success Team (CST), etc., depending on the industry standards relevant to each business's individual needs.

When it comes time to develop this scorecard, however, it's highly recommended that businesses first consult with their Customer Success Manager (CSM) to ensure that they're tracking the right metrics at the right times necessary to assess their customers' experiences over time accurately.

Accurate customer health scores are essential in better understanding what is working - and what isn't - when it comes to your business's specific products/services so you can make informed decisions about optimizing your Customer Success strategy moving forward.

Keeping these scores up-to-date gives you an overall picture of your current state, which will help shape future plans for growth and development within your company and improve relationships with current and future clients.

The Signals That Customer Health Scores are Out of Date

Customers’ needs, behaviors, and goals change over time, so customer health scores need to be regularly updated to reflect those changes. If your customer health scores are outdated, you may see a significant drop in customer satisfaction, an increase in churn rate, and a decrease in customer engagement.

Parative Revenue Expansion Offer

To keep up with changing customer expectations, paying attention to any signals that may indicate that your customer health score is out of date is essential.

Let’s look at the signals alerting you that your customer health score needs updating.

  1. Decrease in Customer Satisfaction: A decrease in customer satisfaction is one of the most obvious indicators that something is wrong, and your customer health score may be outdated. Low survey results and net promoter scores are two key metrics to watch for when monitoring the health of your customers.
  2. Increase in Churn Rate: Unhappy customers leave, and if they’re leaving in droves, it could be a sign that something isn't working or your customer health score is outdated. Keep an eye on existing customers to ensure they remain happy and loyal customers.
  3. Decrease in Product Usage and Engagement: Lower product usage and decreased engagement is other important indicator that something has gone wrong. The metrics for scoring customer wellness need a refresh. Monitor healthy customers closely by tracking their usage rates and general support tickets or stories submitted from existing customers who are unhappy with their experience or journey within your product or service.

Keeping track of these signals will give you better insights into how your customers interact with and engage with your product enabling you to make proactive changes quickly when necessary, whether through providing more resources or improving education materials, for example, all while moving towards higher retention rates and greater overall success for both you and them.

Refreshing your customer health score metrics regularly ensures accuracy. This score should reflect the most current customer needs, goals, behavior, and sentiment data.

If changes become visible, it is crucial to take immediate action. To do so, you should dive deeper into relevant data sources such as usage rates, support tickets, and survey results. Adjustments should be made where necessary to stay ahead.

The Risks of Out-of-Date Customer Health Scores

When customer health scores are outdated, it can lead to several risks that can hurt your business.

1. Decreased Customer Satisfaction

When customer health scores are not current, businesses may miss opportunities to identify and address potential customer issues before they become critical.

This can lead to decreased customer satisfaction and even churn. Keeping customer health scores up to date will help ensure that customers’ needs and concerns are addressed promptly, which can prevent or mitigate issues that could lead to lost customers.

2. Increased Churn

Outdated customer health scores can also lead to increased churn due to missed opportunities for retention or upsell/cross-sell activities.

If customer health scores are not up-to-date, businesses may miss important signals indicating when customers may be at risk of leaving or looking for additional services or products.

By keeping customer health scores current, businesses will be better equipped to identify and act on these signals quickly before it leads to lost customers.

3. Poor Decision Making

Using out-of-date customer health scores can also lead to poor decision-making, as businesses may rely on inaccurate data when deciding on their customers’ success.

For example, if the latest net promoter score is outdated, businesses may overestimate their customers' satisfaction level and make decisions based on this false assumption.

To avoid this risk and ensure accurate decision-making, businesses should always strive to keep their customer health scores up-to-date by regularly collecting customer feedback and monitoring product usage metrics.

Keeping your customer health scores up-to-date is essential for ensuring successful outcomes with your customers – providing insights into how they interact with your product or service while allowing you to better serve them through targeted initiatives designed specifically for each segment or group within your audience.

How to Optimize Your Customer Health Scores

Customer health scores are potent indicators of customer satisfaction, engagement, retention, and expansion.

A customer health score can tell you a lot about your customer's interactions with your product or service and how likely they are to remain engaged or expand their relationship with your business.

But it’s important to remember that customer health scores can be inaccurate if they are not regularly updated.

By regularly reviewing and updating your customer health scores, you can ensure that they accurately reflect current customer behaviors, goals, and needs - resulting in a better correlation between churn and expansion.

Why Should You Update Your Customer Health Score?

Updating your customer health score is important because it ensures that the score accurately reflects current customer behaviors, goals, and needs. With an outdated health score, you risk making decisions based on inaccurate information, which could lead to costly mistakes such as underinvesting in a valuable segment of customers or misallocating resources to less profitable customers.

Additionally, by incorporating churn data into your customer health score, you can get a more complete picture of customer satisfaction and engagement - providing valuable insight into which customers may be at risk for churning or expanding their relationship with your business.

How To Update Your Customer Health Score

Updating your customer health score doesn't have to be complicated or time-consuming. Here are a few steps to get started:

  1. Review the metrics and factors currently used to calculate your customer health score: Are these still relevant? Are there any new metrics or factors that should be included?
  2. Integrate retention and churn data into calculating your customer health score: By incorporating retention data into the equation, you can get a complete picture of how customers feel about their experience with your product or service.
  3. Review and update your customer health scores: Review your scores regularly (at least once per quarter) to remain accurate and current with current customer behavior patterns and trends.

Take Action Quickly

By taking some simple steps now, you can ensure that your customer health scores remain accurate over time - leading to a better correlation between churn and expansion rates and improved decision-making across all business areas.

Leveraging Parative for Improving Customer Health Scores

In the world of SaaS, customer health scores are integral to success. A customer health score is a metric used to measure how likely a customer is to stay with your business and continue spending money with you.

By understanding customers’ needs, successes, and challenges, SaaS companies can better tailor their product offerings and service experiences to meet those needs.

Parative's Revenue Scoring Engine helps businesses understand and predict customer likelihood to buy more or churn.

The platform monitors customer behavior, usage, intent, contract consumption, feedback, and market conditions to score each customer's outcome readiness in real-time.

It takes into account data from all sources, including:

  • Net Promoter Score (NPS)
  • Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
  • Customer Effort Score (CES)
  • Survey results
  • Customer sentiment
  • Product usage rates
  • Support tickets

Along with an infinite variety of custom scoring models.

With the ability to connect to any customer data source and use the Parative ID Matrix to unify records, businesses can bring all their data together and merge it into truly unified records.

Dynamic Customer Health Scoring With Parative

Create dynamic rules for a myriad of scores with Parative

Parative offers an extensive suite of capabilities that SaaS companies take action on customer health scores to improve them.

A 360-Degree View

Parative helps companies get a comprehensive 360-degree view of their customers by unifying all their data into one source – including NPS scores, CSAT scores, CES scores, and more – so businesses can gain deeper insights into their customers' behaviors.

This helps them make informed decisions about optimizing the customer experience.

Automation in Your Existing Tools

Parative automates action in other tools by proactively alerting teams and triggering workflows when scoring indicates opportunity.

For example, suppose a company’s analysis reveals that a particular segment of customers is underperforming or at risk of churning.

In that case, they can use Parative's automated triggers to alert the appropriate team or individual so they can take action quickly before it's too late.

This automation allows teams to respond quickly when an issue arises without continuously monitoring every account or segment of customers.

Identify Hidden Opportunities

Finally, Parative also helps businesses identify potential upselling opportunities by tracking changes in customer behavior over time and identifying customer segments who may be ready for additional services or products the company offers.

This helps companies prioritize which customers should be targeted for upsells based on the data gathered from past interactions with them to maximize Return On Investment (ROI).

Parative is an innovative Revenue Scoring Engine enabling SaaS companies to understand their customers better to improve their overall health scores.

Not only does it provide detailed insights into each individual’s behavior, but it also offers automated triggers for quick response times when issues arise, as well as identifying upselling opportunities for increased ROI.

Conclusion

Customer health scores are a powerful tool for any business looking to optimize its customer success strategy.

By regularly monitoring and updating customer health scores, businesses can stay current and accurately reflect their customers' behaviors, goals, and needs. By understanding customer health scores, businesses can take proactive approach to improve customer satisfaction, reduce churn risk, and drive better results.

Parative makes it easy to keep your customer health score up-to-date by providing the latest metrics and data from sources such as net promoter score (NPS), customer effort score (CES), customer satisfaction score (CSAT), product usage rate, support tickets, survey results, customer segmentation, existing customers base, usage rate, customer relationship management (CRM), customer stories, customer journey mapping and many more.

With Parative’s help, you can create a practical playbook for your Customer Success team to increase loyalty and engagement while creating a healthy customer base.

A well-managed and data-driven approach to Customer Success will enable businesses to maximize their efforts in improving overall customer experience and retention rates.

This ultimately leads to increased business growth through better customer engagement and improved loyalty over time.

Through regular analysis of your customers’ health scores using Parative’s powerful tools and resources, you can ensure that you are delivering a superior level of service that meets or exceeds your customers' expectations.

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by
Mark Lerner

Head of Marketing @ Parative, the Customer Behavior Platform. SaaS enthusiast, B2B Marketing Specialist, Startup Survivalist. Dad x2.

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