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?

In this episode, our host Anika Zubair chats with Andrew Marks, Co-Founder of SuccessHACKER, about how to build effective health scores.

For over 25 years, Andrew has served as an operational executive in customer-facing roles. In that time, he has seen Customer Success grow from being little more than an idea to an industry standard, and welcomed the opportunity to support the growth of the CS community every step of the way.

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.

“I think 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. Essentially, making sure that the right people are doing the right things - in the right ways - at the right times - to help your customers move closer to their desired outcomes.

“Now, that being said, 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 surprise.”

Listen now to the full conversation with Andrew and Anika to learn how to minimize the risks and create the most relevant health scores for your business.