Health Score for non-SaaS companies?

Jeff Yeger

Hi all,

Does anyone have experience developing a health score for a company that doesn't have a SaaS platform?

We can't use logins/engagement with the platform as a metric, what others would you recommend and how/where would you track it?

Daryl Colborne

Hey Jeff,
Not sure how many customers you have and/or CSMs, but if you are leveraging a high touch model where you CSMs are often in contact with your customer base, you could have the CSMs run a periodic "assessment" of the key customer stakeholders (Economic buyer, Decision Maker, Champion and/or Users, etc.). Each assessment would have a score of 1 (very unhealthy thru 5 (very healthy) and worst case scenario, you could track in a spreadsheet.

Other things you could consider that could contribute to the health score -- # of unresolved support cases, escalations, license utilization, feature request generation, period surveys on CSAT, Customer Effort Score (CES) and/or NPS

Regards,

Daryl

Brian Hartley

Hey Jeff - at my previous company we relied on salesforce to tell us about the health.  In our salesforce environment we had visibility into contracts, opportunities, time spent, case load and from there we tried to make sense of it all.  Wasn't perfect by any means which is why we relied more heavily on the account directors to assess health (much smaller ration 15:1, customers to ADs)

Emmanuel Malanda

Hi Jeff,

I would say keep it simple and find what works for your organisation. Its easy to create a monster with health scores and even after investing so much time on them, you may find them to be hit and miss... CSMs dont look at them and it ends up being this score that everybody sees but that nobody actually trusts.

I am in FinTech and the majority of my customers are on premise customers therefore things like usage data are completely irrelevant so i ended up stripping it back to the CSMs providing a score.  Call it CSM sentiment which is really as Daryl put  a range from 1 bad to 5 very good.  This works for high touch , medium touch but for low touch and as customers increase, it can become tricky... so over time and depending on the segment, i have added other indicators which i have observed over time to having payed an important part in the health of the client. e.g. Positive relationship activities such as recommendations, referrals etc. and also added other stuff like invoice history i.e. late payments and outstanding invoices etc. 

It can easily become very complicated and quite easily the score could end up being meaningless so i suggest you start with  one or two parameters that you know for sure have been proven to indicate good or bad health within your organisation and then slowly expand but not too much.

Hope this helps

Emmanuel


------------------------------
Emmanuel Malanda
Global Head-Customer Success
------------------------------
-------------------------------------------
Original Message:
Sent: 08-11-2020 14:31
From: Jeff Yeger
Subject: Health Score for non-SaaS companies?

Hi all,

Does anyone have experience developing a health score for a company that doesn't have a SaaS platform?

We can't use logins/engagement with the platform as a metric, what others would you recommend and how/where would you track it?


------------------------------
Jeff Yeger
Head of Customer Success
IT Central Station
------------------------------

Steve Bernstein

Hi Jeff -- We take a very different approach than other suggestions here by asking the customer to assess their experience and success, not asking the CSM.  The CSM has the responsibility of engaging the right contacts to participate in providing feedback and then our own product, Waypoint's TopBox, provides measurements of account-relationship through
1. Stakeholder mapping (making sure there is adequate "footprint" in the account in terms of working with the right decision makers and influencers based on the account's value or tier)
2. Engagement of those contacts
4. Sentiment of those contacts
5. Benchmarking "this" account against others like it

When integrated with your existing customer management/engagement processes, there's no "extra" work for CSMs and the benefits are that you get
- Accurate sentiment and relationship-strength insights,
- An excellent predictor of churn (we know that accounts that won't participate in the process are ~14x more likely to churn than accounts that do, but more importantly when set up properly the ~80% response rate that you acquire provides excellent "voice-of-customer" insights for the rest of the company to be on your same page)
- Up-to-date contact data in salesforce (we all know how quickly it gets stale)
- Trustworthy (representative) customer feedback that makes it easier to align the company around the right improvements/priorities
- Ability to measure CSM performance based on process-adoption and customer relationships (we don't want to measure CSMs on things they have no control over, so measuring how well they are able to grow their "footprint" and engagement inside the account is a key leading metric)

Here's an article that explains the process in a bit more detail 
https://waypointgroup.org/secret-easy-b2b-retention-expansion-relationships/
...and I'm happy to provide additional info/resources for anyone looking for more.
/Steve