Support health score

Parul Bhandari

Hello all!  

I lead success, support and services - all important post imp pillars of our business.  I have noticed our health scores are not fullly capturing "support health" of our clients.  For example, a customer has high usage, engagement, etc.  but 50% of the engagement is on support tickets.  

Anyone have any thoughts on a support health score?  I am thinking of a multi-variable score like the success score, which can feed into my success health score.  But also, be compared as a metric on its own.  

I have some ideas, but wonder if anyone has done this yet?  And if using ChurnZero/SF even better.  

Ed Powers

I'm not following, @Parul Bhandari. Most times, people construct customer health scores to evaluate churn risk, a dependent random variable (Y), based on some combination of independent random variables (X's). What are you assuming to be your dependent and independent variables for your support health score?

I've learned in my own experience running support operations that the goal is to minimize costs while maximizing quality (Y's). Costs depend on incoming volumes, staffing levels, and handle times (X's), and typical workforce management software models Service Levels from these variables. Support also typically aims to increase customer satisfaction. This is obviously done by responding quickly to customers, resolving the issue to their satisfaction quickly, and making their interaction a pleasant one (X's). It's certainly possible to develop a predictive model for quality as well, but keep in mind the variation tends to be much higher, which limits predictive power in the model. 

Unfortunately, quality support is usually taken for granted, and while overall customer satisfaction correlates with overall retention and growth, I have not seen transaction CSAT or NPS be strongly predictive of individual account decisions. It's certainly possible, however, that it's true in your case. 

Seth Wylie

Our approach to support health scores hasn't changed too much over the years, which says good things about how it's useful for us! Described here: https://www.gainsight.com/blog/how-gainsight-support-uses-gainsight-and-why-you-should-too/

Parul Bhandari

@Seth Wylie this is what I was after - thanks!