Your company’s B2B brand strategy should include understanding the strength of your customer relationships. It’s part of a successful product launch and overall brand strategy. A customer health score is an effective way to break down the complexities of customer relationships into easy-to-understand and trackable metrics that are relevant to your industry and your company.
Everyone involved in delivering the customer experience, from product design to marketing to sales to customer service, will benefit from knowing what drives your successful relationships, where you are strong, and what areas you can improve. You will be able to see patterns, spot trends early, identify your most profitable customers, and more. You can then use these insights to guide how you will improve customer engagement for optimal customer success.
That is why it is important to run customer health checks on a regular basis for your overall brand health and a healthy bottom-line.
Conducting Customer Health Checks
Research is at the heart of creating your customer health score. Setting a customer health check starts with defining your customers, selecting your metrics, choosing your research methodologies, and finally, designing your analytics dashboard.
- Define your customers. Identify the key players in making decisions and using your product. Knowing who you need to talk to is invaluable in custom recruiting the right sample for your research.
- Select metrics. The key is selecting what to measure on an ongoing basis. You will want to focus on metrics that are most relevant to your business.
- Choose research methodologies. B2B market research services can be a valuable resource for understanding and improving customer relationships. Using a mixed method research, like the NewtonX Q3 approach that integrates quantitative and qualitative methodologies, will give you nuanced insights along with statistically valid customer data. Brand trackers, user surveys, and in-depth interviews can all play a role.
- Design your dashboard. Tracking customer health over time will be more useful when you can quickly access customer data and understand the story it tells. A well-designed dashboard lets you get to the insights you need for making good decisions fast. You gain insights about the B2B customer journey.
16 customer health scoring questions to drive success
The specific metrics that go into your customer success health score should be customized to your business. Not every possible metric will make sense for every company. Some metrics will be more useful than others. The important thing is to select those metrics that best measure what drives healthy long-term customer relationships. Create benchmarks and targets so you can compare results to an average and progress toward a goal. Here are common customer health metric questions:
- How long has the customer done business with you? What is your customer churn rate and customer retention rate?
- How many products do customers buy on average?
- How much do they buy in volume and dollars? What is the average order value?
- How often do they buy? What is the purchase frequency?
- What is the product usage rate among your customers?
- Has their account with you grown over time?
- Do they buy upgrades or increase renewals? What is your repeat customer rate?
- What is your win/loss ratio when it comes to new business?
- How often do customers engage with you across channels?
- What kind of feedback do you get? Complaints or kudos? Returns and rejections?
- What engagement do they have within your community, mentioning you on social media, responding to surveys, making recommendations, etc.?
- What is their net promoter score? What is the referral rate?
- What is your customer satisfaction score?
- How well does your business keep existing customers and generate revenue from them over time?
- What value do your customers bring to your business over time? What is the lifetime value of your customers?
- What other metrics are specific to your industry?
