❤️Health Framework
Build an accurate and actionable health score
About
Tracking customer health is synonymous with Customer Success. However, health scores can either be misleading (not tracking the right things) or lack clarity (no apparent action to take). This use case walks through an approach to developing your health score and operationalizing the activities needed to capitalize on opportunities and extinguish risks identified by the health score.
Use Case Overview
A sound health framework consists of four things:
Accurate Health Inputs: Markers that provide insight into the symptoms of customer health
Defined Health Strategy: Consistent & thematic story to diagnose customer health
Actionable Framework: Provide the prescription to increase customer health
Trackable Health Performance: Visiblitility into the outcomes of your health framework
Watch the video below to see the entire build-out:
How to Built It
Step 1: Identify Health Inputs (Symptoms)
The first step is to identify all the inputs that can have a tangible impact on customer health. Usually, these inputs are stage-specific (i.e., properly weighted by the stage the customer is in) to account for lifecycle variances.
Below, we have compiled a list of the most common (and helpful) types of inputs we see across our customer base:
| Input Name | Description |
|---|---|
Initial Setup Events | Key product events that take place during onboarding |
Baseline Configurations | Initial admin settings that require proper setup |
Activity-Based Events | Product events that should increase over time |
Seat-Usage Events | Overall utilization of allocated seats |
Use Case Events | How many core use cases/features are being leveraged |
Internal Sentiment | The "Pulse" of the CSM on the accounts health |
Customer Setniment | The customers statated sentiment via surveying |
Engagement Activities | Volume, frequency, or timing of key interactions |
Open Risks | Volume, frequency, or timing of escalations, requests, or bugs |
Multi-threaded Relationships | Key personas identified, relationships established, and active champions |
Goal Progress | Progress to stated customer outcomes |
ROI | Total value realized |
Step 2: Define Health Strategy (Diagnosis)
Developing a health strategy is taking the inputs that impact customer health and thematically structuring them to drive action and create consistent internal dialogue (i.e., everyone is on the same page with how customer health is measured and discussed).
This strategy includes four separate health scores under which all the inputs roll. The first score is more foundational and tracks the health and maturity of the initial implementation setup. The remaining scores represent three distinct "relationships" that are important to develop and maintain.
Feel free to skip Step 3 if your Health Score is a well-oiled machine predicting opportunity or risk. However, if you still need to determine how to track customer health, this is for you.
Step 2A: Health Score 1 - Tracking Implementation Maturity
Why this matters
The customer's initial setup can have long-term implications on the "ceiling" of value they can receive from your product. If they don't implement the tool correctly at the beginning, they could be limited in your tool's functionality and use cases. We want to track any items that tell if the customer successfully activated the product in an ideal way.
What to Include
| Input Name | Description |
|---|---|
Initial Setup Events | Key product events that take place during onboarding |
Baseline Configurations | Initial admin settings that require proper setup |
Where to Build It
Create a health score that you can name "Implementation," and add your unique inputs based on the guidance from the table above.
Step 2B: Health Score 2-3 - Tracking Different "Relationships"
2. Engagement: Customer's Relationship to Your Team/CS organization
Why this matters
Although somewhat subjective, the inputs in this can tell the most crucial story. This may not be the most important relationship, but if we don't have this, it intensifies the pressure on the other scores, leaves us in the dark, and removes our ability to engage with the customer meaningfully.
What to Include
| Input Name | Description |
|---|---|
Internal Sentiment | The "Pulse" of the CSM on the accounts health |
Customer Setniment | The customers statated sentiment via surveying |
Engagement Activities | Volume, frequency, or timing of key interactions |
Open Risks | Volume, frequency, or timing of escalations |
Multi-threaded Relationships | Key personas identified, relationships established, and active champions |
Where to Build It
Add a health score that you can name "Engagement" in Vitally and your unique inputs based on the guidance from the above table.
3. Usage: Customer's Relationship to Your Product
Why this matters
The second relationship to track is the customer relation to your product. More specifically, are they using it expansively across the team (many people are using it) and extensively (are they leveraging a high percentage of the functionality)? This means we need to track how many people are using it, whether their usage is increasing over time, and whether the use cases being leveraged are also growing. It is also important to track how many issues they are running into with your product.
What to Include
| Input Name | Description |
|---|---|
Activity-Based Events | Product events that should increase over time |
Seat-Usage Events | Overall utilization of allocated seats |
Use Case Events | How many core use cases/features are being leveraged |
Open Risks | Volume, frequency, or timing of requests or bugs |
Where to Build It
Add a health score named "Usage" in Vitally and add your unique inputs based on the guidance from the table above.
4. Outcomes: Customer's Relationship to Their Outcomes
Why this matters
Customers buy a product to achieve a tangible outcome. If we are not tracking their progress to those outcomes and ultimately to the ROI of your tool, we are losing sight of the most important relationship.
What to Include
| Input Name | Description |
|---|---|
Goal Progress | Progress to stated customer outcomes |
ROI | Total value realized |
Where to Build It
Add a health score named "Outcomes" in Vitally and your unique inputs based on the guidance from the above table.
Step 3: Create Health Actions (Prescription)
Now that we have built a health score, we can answer the question: So what? This is where we can provide the prescription for our team to execute. The scores from Step 2 are thematically grouped. Now, you can build a tailored approach if one of those "relationships"/scores slips into a poor or concerning state.
Buildout Prescription With Projects
Take each health score and build a corresponding project template. The contents of the templates will be specific to you, but the goal is to distill your strategies and best practices into the template to increase the corresponding health score rating.
You can build one for implementation, but we will focus on the 3 relationships outlined in Step 2. You should end up with three projects:
Project 1: Poor Health: Engagement
Project goal: Outline plays to run to develop a better customer relationship
Project 2: Poor Health: Usage
Project goal: Outline plays to run to increase product adoption
Project 3: Poor Health: Outcomes
Project goal: Outline plays to run to align on reasonable objectives & outline ROI
Although the contents of the projects will be specific to you, there are some tips when building them out:
Add a "Health" Project Category for these templates.
Use obvious naming conventions for clarity (e.g., "Poor Health: Engagement")
Describe the intent behind the project in the description area
Create tasks for each health score input
Provide clear instructions in the body of the task on how to strengthen that input
Link to enablement resources on addressing an input (documentation, videos, etc.)
Buildout Prescription With Projects
Leverage playbooks automation to automatically trigger the assignment of a project template when the corresponding health score slips into poor health. You will want one playbook automation for each health score/project template.
Step 4: Track Health Performance (Outcomes)
It is important to test if you are detecting the right symptoms, if the diagnoses are correct, and if your prescriptions are making an impact. To do this, we will want to build dashboard reports that allow us to determine if our inputs are correlated to overall health, if the individual health scores are accurate predictors of risk and opportunity, and if the deployment of specific health projects is driving a positive impact on the health score.
Health Input Reporting
Now that you have built a health score, we recommend building a dashboard to test if the inputs in your health scores are actual indicators of success or risk. Some sample reports you could create:
Feature Heat Map: Display usage of features across customers by tier and by health category
Engagements: Display calls & conversations across customers by tier and health category
Sentiment Analysis: Display NPS across customers by tier and health category
Consider creating a Custom Trait to roll up key values (Ex. Sum notes that represent important CS calls.
Overall Health Reporting
This dashboard will serve as your home base for tracking overall health. The key is to track if your overall Health Score is correlated to key business outcomes (like NRR), and if the individual Health Scores have that same correlation. You can add as many reports to this dashboard as you would like, but you have reports that tell you the following:
Overall NRR performance & NRR performance by health category
Health Score-specific NRR performance
Overall Health trends (ie, how many in each category, change in health over time, etc.)
Health Project Reporting
Lastly, we need to ensure we are monitoring if the prescription we are deploying via projects impacts the overall health of the customer. Some simple reports to include would be:
Baseline metric showing average health scores for accounts with no completed project
Metric showing average health score for accounts with completed projects
Project status by start date
Health Score trends over time
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