How To Improve Customer Health Scores

If you are struggling with low customer health scores, or have a few important customers that are starting to become a worry, it is important to make some quick changes that will make all the difference to improve the ultimate outcome. In this blog, we discuss what a 'Customer Health Score' is, and some excellent methods of quickly and surely driving those numbers up.

Viewpoint Analysis and our Voice of the Customer service area sees us help companies who are concerned with low customer health scores - taking a structured approach to improving them so that they can ultimately improve customer satisfaction and those all-important renewal outcomes.

What is a Customer Health Score?

A Customer Health Score is a considered value or score that an organization places on a customer account to indicate their satisfaction and likelihood to recommend or continue working with them in the future.

Why are Customer Health Scores important?

A Customer Health Score is important because it indicates whether various measurements show that a customer is happy or not. When a company has numerous customer contracts or is tracking its most important customers, a Customer Health Score is a way of assigning a numerical value to each, allowing them to be placed on a scale that clearly indicates their level of satisfaction.

Senior leaders like to have a Customer Health Score so that they can quickly determine which accounts are healthy and which need some additional focus and action plans.

Methods to improve Customer Health Scores

Working with companies to help drive improved customer satisfaction and raise customer health scores is something that the Viewpoint Analysis team finds really satisfying. Sitting in the middle of the buyer and seller equation, it means we have a unique position that enables us to support vendors to drive increased performance and help their customers to be happier with their service. Here are some proven methods to drive the CHS higher:

Customer Success Checkups

The most effective approach to improving customer health scores is to work with the customer team to gain a deep understanding of how they are finding the particular product or service. By interviewing all the different levels of users - from the project sponsor, to the product owner, and the users themselves, we can quickly demonstrate two things:

1) That we care. The vendor is open to listening to their customers - not just running surveys, but actually communicating with and listening to real-world situations. Such a small step - but it's a winning start.

2) That we will do something about the feedback - by listening to the feedback, we tick one box, but by acting on the feedback, that brings a whole new level of demonstrable value.

By conducting interviews across multiple levels in the customer's business, it also shows that we care about not just user satisfaction, but business case achievements and the owner of the product and their reputation, and peaceful night's sleep!

If you would like to learn more about how the Viewpoint Analysis team approaches Customer Success Checkups and the value that an independent company offers in running these and mediating between the vendor and customer, take a look at our Customer Success Check-up service.

Investing in customer education

Another good approach that tends to help drive up customer health scores is to focus on education. A primary reason for low customer health scores may be that the product's users have not received sufficient training, or perhaps they weren't aware of the most recent product developments and releases. By investing in additional customer education (and ideally building this into the engagement as part of their annual contract (or similar)), we can see a simple way to demonstrate that the team cares but also to drive usage of the product and usage of new (and therefore innovative and game-changing) features.

Act on risky signals early

If we are tracking the top X percentage of low customer health scores, we should be actively watching and listening for risky signals. These might include items such as customer support calls, escalations, or concerning feedback from the customer success or sales account teams. As soon as we hear of any worrying and risky signals, we need our team to act and demonstrate to the customer that we have listened, we have responded, and we have solved or progressed the issue that has been raised.

Customers do not want to shout about their concerns too many times - it is really important that we are listening for those all important signals, and that we're demonstrating that we care. Doing this quickly and effectively is a great way to start to repair and build those scores.

Revisit the initial purchase criteria

For some organizations, they can refer back to the original sales engagement to understand why a customer bought the product or service. Perhaps this information can be found in an RFP or RFI document, or it may be included in a customer win note, or in the heads of one or two members of the original sales team. If we understand why they decided to move and purchase what we sell, we can then evaluate whether they are satisfied with the benefits our product or service provides compared to what they had previously. This approach works well for the Customer Success Checkup, but another similar approach can be found in our IT Service Improvement service.

If we can tie back and demonstrate (at multiple levels of the customer organisation chart) that we are taking an active interest in how our product or service is delivering when compared to their initial hopes and expectations, it can be a real game-changer.

Share the health score internally

A poor customer health score is a problem for ALL the company. While businesses invest in winning new clients and pay new business sales teams to smash down doors, this is all ineffective if customers are choosing to leave through the back door. A flashing customer health score should not be the problem of just one person or just one team, it should be a problem that is shared widely, and all resources should be pointed at rectifying the situation.

The score should be on our leadership team's dashboard - and this is even more important for high-profile customers or those with significant contracts. We need to be thinking about all the ways we can improve the scores - and for this, we need the entire business to be pulling in the same direction.

Conclusion

This is not a list of all the different ways to improve customer health scores, but it's our top tips - it's the way Viewpoint Analysis advises our customers to approach those scary numbers.

If you would like to learn more about Viewpoint Analysis and how we work with clients to transform their customer health scores, take a look at our Voice of the Customer area and the different ways that we add our value.

Sitting between the buyers and sellers is our secret sauce - but our passion is to help to continue and grow relationships.