When assessing customer satisfaction, your startup business will likely use many metrics. And for SaaS products, there is a metric that you need to pay attention to, the customer health score. But what is it exactly and how do you get a better rating for it? Let’s explore this one closer.
Understanding How Customer Health Score Works
At its most basic, the customer health score refers to a metric determining the likelihood that a customer will stay or leave your service. The idea here is that the healthier your relationship with your customers, the more likely they stay with you.
The Importance Of Customer Health Scores In SaaS
While many industries now use customer health scores to gauge people’s interest, the SaaS field is the one that has taken to it the most. That is because the SaaS business model depends heavily on continued patronage by individual customers. Using this metric offers several benefits for your startup company.
It Helps You Identify Power Users
Image from Timo Elliot.
The users that you would want to engage more are arguably the ones that use your products the most. And you want to identify these power users as early as possible. The customer health score is an effective way to do that. It lets you see how consistently people use your product and determine if they are gradually spending more time with it.
It Helps You Identify Account Expansion Opportunities
To keep people invested in using your SaaS product, you should always be ready to offer something new. Your customer health score is a useful tool in gauging what that would be. For instance, you can track the usage of your freemium service. From there, your account managers can determine the right time to send an account expansion offer to them.
You Can Identify Potential Churn
Churn is arguably one of the biggest enemies of a SaaS product. After all, you don’t want people leaving after just a few weeks of use. Using the customer health score, you can identify signs of potential churn and get your support team proactively responding to these customers.
You Can Identify Success And Failure Patterns
A customer health score is also handy for looking at the larger picture. By comparing the health scores of your users, you can identify patterns of success and failure. You can then use this information to devise strategies that deal with both.
How Your Startup Business Should Calculate Customer Health Score
Something to note when calculating customer health scores is that you don’t use just one system. As you already know, your users are a varied bunch. They have different preferences on how to use your product. Thus, a single metric might not be enough to describe these variations.
There are a multitude of metrics that you can choose for your customer health scores. These include the following.
- Depth of product usage: This refers to the number of unique features customers use and the frequency.
- The breadth of usage: This metric refers to how many subscribed customers use your products.
- Support tickets open: How many active support tickets do you get from users and how many are active.
- Account growth: The number of renewals made and the payment value for each customer.
- Engagement: You want to look into how often users complete in-app surveys and their chat usage.
- Resource center usage: How often your customers are accessing your resource center.
The actual combination of metrics you will use depends on the customer persona you are tracking. As such, you end up with several systems.
Assigning The Weight And Impact Of Each Metric
With all the metrics you have to track, it might be confusing the first time. This is where you need to sort everything out. You should assign a score to the given metric based on the product and the user persona. For instance, if your SaaS product requires using your resource center, you might want to put more weight on that metric over, say, logins.
Image from Xupler.
As mentioned, you also need to consider the user persona. Here, note the ideal workflow each persona might take when using your service. From there, you can start similarly assigning scores as above.
Once you have determined the final formula for your customer health score, don’t expect it to be permanent. As your product and customers evolve, the metrics you need to track will likely change. Thus, you need to review and revise your health score formulas as soon as you see these changes.
Helping Your Startup Company Use Health Scores For Customer Success
Keeping track of all those metrics can be a challenge. Virtua Solutions is ready to help you here. Our agents can be the ones tracking your metrics as part of our customer support duties. With that, you can get the latest figures a lot faster.
But our help doesn’t end there. To take advantage of the figures you get, you need the right approach. Our team can provide extensive support to ensure that your customers get the service they need.
Proactive Engagement For Your Startup Business
To maintain the health of customers, you don’t just react to the problems they lodge in. You should also be more proactive in responding to their potential needs. We can serve as your first responders, reaching out to customers regularly. We check on them and ask if there are issues they are encountering. The earlier we can get to these concerns, the better your support team can launch its response.
Image from Contact Center Solutions.
Additionally, we can respond to signs of potential churn. Like the above, we will be the ones to interview your customers about why they are tempted to leave. From there, our agents can put forward any offers you have to convince them to stay.
Virtua Solutions’ help goes further from here. Our agents are experts in customer success and will help you develop new engagement strategies. We will study all the customer health figures we have gathered and prepare a plan that best suits specific customer needs.
Keep Your Customers Healthy And Your Startup Business Happy
When tracked and used effectively, customer health scores can do a lot for orienting your SaaS startup business towards a successful; relationship with users. And to get more of that, you need the help of the right team. Contact us today and let’s get started in helping your patrons.