Health Score is important for enhancing Customer Success.
But Health Score is not all that matters, and yet Customer Success managers are overly concerned about this metric.
Health Score is also not the first thing a Customer Success Director should address.
There are two prerequisites for Health Score to work well.
Unless appropriate actions are taken based on the Health Score, it will not lead to any outcomes.
This is not a problem for customers covered by high-touch (one-on-one customer success operations such as phone calls and meetings), but what about cases where high-touch is not cost-effective?
For example, if you have 100 customers with ‘Red lights’, do you make a phone call to all of them to arrange a meeting? The answer should be no.
Also, do we send a one-size-fits-all “How are you doing?” e-mail to the 100 red-light customers? The answer to this question, too, should be no.
Just because a customer’s spend is low does not mean that their expectations for customer success communications are low.
If you do not tailor your communications to each customer, even with a highly accurate Health Score, they will end up with a higher churn rate than the high-tier customers.
Let’s imagine you frequently correspond by letter with 100 friends and you’re too busy to handle them! So, what would you do? Do you start by prioritizing the 100 people you have to deal with? The answer is no. They’re your precious friends! You would first buy a cell phone so that you can communicate with them via SMS, or subscribe to the Internet so that you can communicate with them via email.
Being obsessed with Health Score before developing a customer communication platform is like starting a prioritization process because there is not enough time to send a lot of hand-written letters. (Why not just buy a cell phone first!)
The same is true for customer success. It is important to be able to provide personalized and optimal customer success communications to a large number of customers before working on the Health Score.
The second pitfall is getting a Health Score, but the suggestions do not lead to any actions.
The common mistake is “this customer is not making good use of our services, so it’s a ‘Red light’. That’s all.”
Health Score should be a KPI that is the source of action, and it is meaningless if it is just a report of results.
In order to get a precise Health Score that leads to action, it is necessary to incorporate not only service usage data but also customer behavior data into the Health Score.
(Back to the first point.) It is important to have an optimal customer communication platform in place to obtain behavioral data in the first place.
Again, Health Score is important for enhancing Customer Success.
But Health Score is not where you should start with.
You should have a solid customer infrastructure to communicate with your customers in a scalable and personalized way.
Don’t worry, Commune gets you covered.
Commune is a Customer Communication Platform for Customer Success teams that enables “one-to-one quality communication in a form of the tech-touch, scalable way”.
Commune works as a one-stop shop for your customers to do all digital CS communications in one place.
You’re able to have integrated and holistic customer action data across features, such as viewing the Knowledge base, completing E-learning, answering survey questions, and helping other customers.
It means you can provide personally optimized customer success communication across features, based on customer segment and behavior.
Our customers enjoy 14% improved retention rates, #of inquiries reduced by 20%, 900% of ROI, and more.
If you wanna learn more, let’s have a 15 min quick demo session with us!
