Almost every CS team has a health score. Far fewer have one that the team believes. The usual symptom is familiar: accounts marked green churn, red accounts renew, and CSMs quietly override the score with their own judgment.
Start with outcomes, not opinions
Before choosing signals, look at what actually happened. Compare customers who renewed and expanded with those who churned or contracted. Which behaviors and attributes differed in the months before the outcome? This analysis will often confirm some intuitions and overturn others.
Use multiple dimensions
- Product: breadth and depth of adoption, trend over time
- Relationship: executive sponsor engagement, number of active stakeholders
- Outcomes: progress against the customer's stated success criteria
- Commercial: payment behavior, contract changes, support escalations
Connect states to actions
A score that does not trigger action is decoration. Define what should happen when an account moves into each state, who is responsible, and within what timeframe.
Recalibrate regularly
Products, customers and data change. Review the model's predictive accuracy at least twice a year and adjust signals and weightings as evidence accumulates.