Moving from reactive to proactive

Vasu

I'm looking at implementing some sort of alerting or monitoring, preferably customer health scoring to monitor usage and trigger alerts. Currently forced to react to customer actions which isn't an ideal scenario.

Would love to hear how you implemented something similar - triggers based on product usage, or some sort of health scoring to monitor and identify customer disengagement or churn without a CSM software.

PS - Brownie points if this can be achieved using a free tool or Google Sheets.

Thanks in Advance,
Vasu

Jay Nathan

You can totally begin mapping out a scorecard manually, then gathering data from systems and putting together playbooks. You can start with a spreadsheet / Google Sheets, and when you need to scale, move it into your CRM or even investigate whether a CS platform is worth the investment. 

First thing I'd suggest is to identify the drivers of good and bad customer health and retention. Then identify how you want to measure for those drivers. From there you can determine what conditions for each measure would give you a Green, Yellow or Red indicator, and finally, what you will do as a response, i.e. define your playbooks.  

Here are some example metrics you could consider. These will need to be unique to your organization, and I'd choose 3-5 to start with that really impact customer retention. 

 

Vasu

Thank you for this @Jay Nathan 

Steve Bernstein

I agree with @Jay Nathan's guidance, and add that we know it's important to engage the key stakeholders in the account "from day 1."  In other words, Jay's advice to work out the drivers of health and retention is key. But that doesn't mean you just wait: The data you need come from customers, and best to to do with a voice-of-customer/customer-engagement program in place since the best and easiest way to know what's-working /needs-improvement to let your customers tell you. I would advise at this stage that you don't try to only use internal data to figure that out from the inside-out because then you'll only be guessing at those drivers. So while you're waiting for good data to work out those drivers start with a program to engage those key contacts -- you'll not only strengthen relationships with those people, but will also collect the key data to be able to drive the optimal improvements (at the individual account level and also across account segments/cohorts).  Here's are article that provides details... what do you thin? More detail I can provide?

https://waypointgroup.org/stop-chasing-renewals-heres-how-to-keep-customers-engaged-so-renewals-and-more-will-just-come/

Jung Kim

Depending on your company and team size, it might be worth the monthly customer audit to get some of this manually (but free!). 

We have a BI tool that isn't integrated with our CRM, but because we've done this manually and know what we want to measure/have a version of manual scoring, we're now in the process of getting software. 

For example, what are 3 key measurements that you'd want to know at any request time about a customer? What of those measurements would be metrics that would put a customer at risk? When they get yellow, what is the plan of action and RACI matrix breakdown? Even with small teams, important to have that distinction to ensure streamlined processes. 

Vasu

Thank you for this @Steve Bernstein. This makes sense and it's a great position to be in - identifying your key drivers while developing your relationships. 
Your article is quite clear on how to approach this and what needs to be done. 
I'm excited to give this a try.

Vasu

Thank you @Jung Kim. We've recently started doing monthly customer audit calls to address this. Since I'm currently a 'One Man Army', I've not documented or created a process around different scenarios. Great that you highlighted it. 
Implementing processes will save me a lot of time when we do scale up.