On this month’s episode of The Customer Success Channel Podcast, brought to you by Planhat, I chatted with Andrew Marks, Co-Founder of SuccessHACKER, about how to build effective health scores. Today, most businesses are adopting some level of health scoring in order to track if their customers are healthy or not. So, what are some of the basic metrics that you need to put in place to understand health scoring? And when should a SaaS company consider building out a health score?
Andrew believes in the power of professional training designed to address real-world challenges and opportunities. From teaching and coaching to strategic consulting and technical implementation, he applies his deep experience in post-sales client services to every aspect of his work. In one of SuccessHackers courses, Andrew teaches CSMs how to build effective health scores.
In our discussion Andrew helps answer some of the tricky questions when it comes to building an effective health score:
- What are some of the basic metrics that you need to put in place to understand health scoring? What sort of input/data do you need to add to a health score to make it useful?
- How to do score customers? Do each metric represent a different weight on a scale?
- What do you think is the most effective way to use a health score at a SaaS company?
Some key takeaways from this discussion:
- A good health score has a mixture of leading and lagging indicators. A lot of the time we hear companies talking about retention, churn and upsell – but they are all company metrics and not tracking whether your customers are being successful. We need metrics that are focused on customer health that are actionable, and that also have an effect on those trailing indicators
- Health scores give CS teams insights into what you need to make decisions about, where you spend your time and be confident that you’re spending it in the right place.
- You could have the greatest health scores in the world. You can have the whole thing dialed in. It still doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to avoid having a problem or a surprise
Make sure you listen to the full episode and let me know your thoughts in the comments!