How to Construct a Customer Health Score

Think back to your last doctor’s visit, when the nurse took your vital signs. These didn’t make a complete diagnostic, but they did give your physician a general idea of how well you were doing. Similarly, a health score is an index made up of several “vital” key performance indicators that give you an overall idea of the strength of your customer relationship with your product.

A good health score can help you take a proactive approach to reducing churn, identifying customer pain points and improving your product. It can also help you spot brand champions and uncover upsell opportunities. However, the right health score formula will differ from product to product.

When constructing your health score, first identify the metrics that are most important to achieving customer loyalty. These could be anything from account logins, features used to customer support requests. Then, determine which specific actions influence these metrics and assign a weighted value to them. For example, you may decide that booking a tutor on a digital learning platform is more indicative of a healthy customer than simply visiting your site. Thus, the former will be given a higher weighting.

Once you have identified the key metrics and their weighting, you can create a simple grading scale to facilitate communication and understanding across teams. For instance, you may choose to categorize scores into green (healthy), yellow (at risk) and red (churn). You can even use a ranking system like school grades — score 90 and above receive an A, 80 to 89 a B, 70 to 79 a C, and below 60 a D or F. health score