What is a customer scorecard?

Any person or business can arbitrarily claim success in what they do. To legitimize these claims, companies all over the world track specific metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) to accurately measure their success in different areas of operation. For customer success (CS) teams, customer success analytics racks many of the important metrics for a teams relationship with its customer base.

Having the ability to measure customer success is vital to positive growth for a business. A customer success manager or team should have customer success benchmarks such as a churn rate threshold they are working to stay below. These benchmarks help ensure the customer journey is always a positive one. Today's blog is about how implementing customer scorecards can drastically improve the relationship between your company and the customers.

What is a Customer Scorecard?

A customer scorecard is a tool that CS teams can use to help get a better view of how your company is completing its customer-centric goals. Think of the customer scorecard as a survey your customers can use to give essential feedback about their experience with both your CS team and overall business.

A customer scorecard can help clearly define the status of the relationship between their company to the customer. So what is the importance of a scorecard?. A scorecard allows for a fair and honest review of the interactions between your team and the customer base.

What Makes a Good Scorecard?

With a better understanding of a customer scorecard and how a balanced one can benefit your business, the next question is, "how do you create a scorecard?" The good news is that this process is relatively straightforward. You can create a basic scorecard using a spreadsheet template to get started, but these basic scorecards don't provide actionable insights. A significant problem is that there is no protection from human error using this method. Using a spreadsheet is a great way to generate a basic understanding of what you want to achieve with a scorecard and then use the support of a platform like Planhat.

A best practice is to outline key customer scorecard metrics that provide your CS team with the information they need to improve their processes. There are quite a few metrics that your team will want to track, but to create a scorecard that provides actionable feedback, you will need a scorecard that includes these three elements.

• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Score: A CSAT score tracks the overall satisfaction level that a customer experiences with your product or services. A common way a company can attain a CSAT score is through a survey that asks questions like "How would you rate your customer service experience today?" They would then be given a scale to rate their experience. The scale could be in number form or written answers ranging from dissatisfied to satisfied.

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): An NPS score measures customers' loyalty to your company. On a scale of 1-10, those that respond with 0 to 6 are detractors. The people that respond 7 or 8 are passives, and those who respond 9 or 10 are your promoters. To calculate your NPS score from this data you can use the following formula: NPS = % of Promoters ( — ) % of Detractors.

• Customer Effort Score (CES): A CES score measures the amount of effort a customer puts in order to get an issue resolved, a request fulfilled, or a return handled. Customers are likely to stay loyal to a company that is easy to work with. Think back to when you wanted to return an item, and the process turned into multiple days of phone calls just to resolve the issue. Did you want to buy from them anytime soon? This is the goal of getting a CES score. By issuing a similar survey to the two previous scores, a customer can choose a number on a scale to represent how much effort was involved in getting their desired solution.

Managing all of this information is paramount to your CS team's success. Let Planhat's Customer 360 be your one-stop shop for all your customer insights to aid your efforts. CRM data, support tickets, usage, Health Score, revenue, emails, chat, notes, and tasks are all synced and beautifully displayed in one place.

Planhat: Turn Customer Success into Your Success

At many companies, sales associates are the rockstars and CS are the friendly support people. We think that CS is actually the most essential sales function, and therefore should act like it, and be treated like it. We created our platform to support CS teams in their vital efforts that lead to their overall success. Try a demo of our Customer 360 platform today.