Tracking Customer Health

Archive User

Hi, I'm looking for recommendations of a Customer Health tracker that can plug in to various other CRM systems.  Looking for something a bit more focused on Customer Health than Salesforce.  Any recommendation from the community?

Will Pagden

There’s many tools out there, I am a big advocate personally of Gainsight. But I’m also pretty sure there is smaller more affordable tools if you are just looking for a health scoring system. 

Ronald Krisak

If someone has recommendations for a slimmed down health scoring system tool, without the full investment into something like Gainsight, I would like to check it out.  I do things manually to score our customers currently.

Will Pagden

My company did up until very recently. We invested in Gainsight PX to understand our product usage and we got a great deal on CS which made it a no brainer for us. 

Interested to know how you’re doing it manually? We have another arm of the business who don’t currently have a tool. 

Matt Moody

What all do you take into account for your health scores?

Will Pagden

@Matt Moody happy to discuss this further as its a particularly enjoyable topic of mine.

We currently have a number of sections.

Sentiment - This includes CSM sentiment and Survey Sentiment

Product Usage - Numerous stats relating to our product

Customer - This is engagement, ability to pay on time and whether they are an advocate

Lifecycle - A score calculated based on how long they have been at each lifecycle stage.

 

This only went live last week and we will have monthly reviews until the weighting is correct. We will also tie Churn analysis into these reviews and ensure that the health scores accurately represent the reasons for churn.

Important to note though that not all aspects in our scorecards tie in to the overall health score. We have some just as visuals for the team that dont tie in to score.

 

Matt Moody

@Will Pagden this is great. For sentiment, how are you measuring positive vs negative? 

Have you looked at using the probability of the customer achieving the next set of outcomes (e.g. product outcome: usage goal, business outcome: renewal)?

John Bosch

We're using ChurnZero.  We transitioned from spreadsheets that were manually updated every Friday to that.  Health scores are super easy to set up (as long as you can get that data into the system somehow) and they have a good OOB NPS module.  I love Gainisight but we weren't ready for it.  

Ronald Krisak

• @Matt Moody  @Will Pagden  We are still working through it.  I used a couple of examples I saw from GGR community members.  I do the scoring in excel.  I track
  -- # of bugs or issues where product development needs to engage
  --adoption/lifecycle - where customer is in journey to onboard either initially or any new module
  --usage - I have separate buckets for different types of users, to measure their MtM changes
  --# of support tickets
  --engagement - look at showcases attended, usage of user forum, if they asked us for any enhancements, have they been used as a reference
  -- financials - have they paid on time
  
  I then have a weighted scoring system.
  
  One interesting aspect is the # of bugs & support tickets.  On one hand, you could score a customer low if they raise a number of bugs or support issues.  However, this also means they are using the software more & are flushing out potential issues that can help other customers....so they are engaged.
  
  Interested to hear thoughts on that. 
   fyi @Cassidy Brady 
   

Matt Moody

On the support tickets issue... one thing that we've found helpful is running a correlation matrix on the qty of tickets, sentiment of tickets, types of tickets, and time window vs. positive/negative outcomes. This way you can see if there are aspects of support tickets that have positive/negative correlation with the outcomes you're shooting for.

[updated with image]. Unfortunately I can't share the features, but here's one example of a correlation heatmap. In this case it helped identify correlation across tickets (qty, timing, sentiment, and types) and churn.

John Bosch

@Matt Moody

• NPS - Sentiment
• Outcomes Status
• Mobile Product Adoption (Signups and DAU/MAU) 
• Integration Score (Stickiness) 
• Web Admin Adoption (Logins) 

Matt Moody

Very nice. Curious how you measure outcome status. Is that based on predefined steps/activities towards an outcome?

David Ellin

@Ronald Krisak, I'd view a high number of support tickets as high engagement with potentially negative sentiment. Conversely, when a customer has a lot of suggestions for product improvement, I'd consider that high engagement with likely positive sentiment.

David Ellin

@Matt Moody, have you thought about adding lifecycle of customer journey into your correlation heatmap? That might provide great insights into # tickets during particular lifecycles.

Will Pagden

@Matt Moody sentiment is currently just CSM sentiment, its not good enough and will change, I was interested to hear @Ziv Peled talk about how they measure it yesterday with more of an engagement model, on my long list of to-do's on my 4th week! I should have added, we do have some clever measures in the usage that rates them at where they are at compared to where we believe they should be at at that lifecycle stage so it is baked in. Not looking forward to reverse engineering that one when I need to amend!

Matt Moody

@David L Ellin yep and it is gold. When we converted the data into a time series format it was incredibly helpful. Makes it much clearer when you can see qty/type/sentiment of tickets alongside the stage of the customer journey and naturally, your predictions become much more accurate.

John Bosch

@Matt Moody This is very much a work in progress but we have some standard outcomes that we are able to drive for our customers and a time frame we think we should hit the success criteria in.  If we are on track based on the agreed-to plan with the customer then it's Green.  If we have a blocker that is not critical it's yellow, and if we are stuck then it's red. Admittedly this is an area for us to evolve over the back half of this year.  I'd love to hear from others on how they might be tracking achievement towards customer goals and success criteria.    

Akanksha Gulati

I have a frame-work, It gives me a final Customer Health Indicator. It is in-depth and detailed. It is however manual - and I have had discussions with Top 3 leading CSM Software providers, I have not found one to be able to handle our requirements. Happy to discuss this if i can assist.

Shaun Porcar

Have you looked at https://supervisedai.com/ They're applying machine learning to the challenge of proactively identifying risk and reasons for churn. You can use their dashboard to monitor customer health and create alerts — and I believe you can export their insights to sfdc.

Matt Moody

Would love to hear more about the features you're including in your health score.

Will Pagden

I second this @Matt Moody. would love to hear what @Akanksha Gulati is doing!

Akanksha Gulati

Happy to, may I suggest I setup a meeting to walk through my methodology, I would fail badly if i tried to type it all here

Will Pagden

That would be great, my email in [email protected]. BST timezone. 

Matt Moody

Sounds great to me as well. [email protected]

Brian Hartley

Hey @Will Pagden - for your investment into GainsightPX.  Did the CS team implement and maintain the tool?  Did you have help from other departments?  What was the lift?

Will Pagden

Hi @Brian Hartley, we did not and I would advise against it. Our product team implemented it and its maintained by our product team. Lets not detract from the fact that PX is more of a product managers baby. Its helping with trends of usage etc.

One thing in my mind that Gainsight havent quite got sorted yet is the integration between PX and CS, too technically complicated which causes some issues but we got there in the end.

Matt Myszkowski

I have been thinking a lot around Customer Health recently - it used to be a defining element of your customer success strategy as a CS leader but I am unsure it still is.

How do you all measure the success of your Customer Health Scoring? How much time do you invest in it, and does it reap the rewards? I used to think Customer Health was a critical component but now I get more value from seeing how strong our value realisation articulation is in our Business Reviews. I.E. How we delivered value, have we articulated it and does the customer acknowledge it?

Slightly off topic but keen on thoughts.

Natalie Williams

Hi Matt,

I think a weighted scale of several things is a good approach. The main criteria that i typically like to focus on is:

Adoption
Time to Value
Business Outcomes
Relationship
Customer Feedback

Then i look at primary vs secondary indicators and weigh them a little differently. Then its a calculation of a score at any given time to monitor all these moving pieces.

Attaching something i put together

Hope this helps!
- Natalie

Natalie Williams

We've had great success with Client Success: https://www.clientsuccess.com/. Jarin is my point of contact

Matt Moody

I think the biggest issue with Customer Health Scores is that when you dive into the statistics, the health score is often only moderately correlated with actual success outcomes. If you break down each factor that comprises your customer health score and measure correlation to positive outcomes then you can see where vanity metrics have crept in and are weighing down the health score.

Matt Myszkowski

@Matt Moody I couldn't agree more - much more articulately put than the point I tried to make!