Defining the Customer Health Score

Customer Health Score takes multiple dimensions of customer data metrics and classifies them into a single representation of green, yellow or red. It is a consolidation of all the information that the company has about the customer, from all probes, people and systems, past and current.

If you're new to Customer Health Score, you may find this knowledge base article a good overview or you can learn more What is Customer Health Score? in Totango blog as a good primer on the subject.

Using a complex set of algorithms and business rules, Totango measures the value delivered to the customer, in order to predict their likelihood of renewing their subscription.

For a health score to be an effective KPI, it needs to take into consideration several data types and sources, combined into one health score for each customer.

The specifics depend on the nature of your application and customer success programs. We recommend you schedule time with your Totango Customer Success Manager who will survey your application and data to recommend the most effective strategies for modeling health for your organization. 

Recommended Health Score Configuration

For most applications, we recommend the following baseline settings. Global Admins and those with access to 'Global Settings' can use the Health Designer, found at Global Settings | Health Designer to change these settings

1. A health profile for every major customer-segment / plan

Profiles let us segment customers into natural groups that behave differently, and create a separate scorecard for each.

Segment customers are based on particular characteristics with different behaviors: 

• Types of accounts
• Different products
• Lifecycle stage

Each segment should have its own health definition and score and each customer should qualify for only one segment at a time. Enterprise Health Setting enable you to roll up the Health of all sub-accounts into one Health Score for the parent account.

2. Health Scorecards 

Each Health Profile is defined by a Scorecard to capture the expected behavior of customers in that segment.

As a starting place, we recommend using two built-in product engagement metrics computed by Totango automatically, which have proven to have a strong correlation to sustained product-usage and churn.

1. Usage Frequency
2. License Utilization (or Active Users if your application does not maintain per-seat licenses)

We also recommend adding two custom metrics specific to your business domain, such as in the example below. 

For profiles that represent high touch customers, you may also want to add a Subjective CSM Risk Rating.

Customer Health Score Tune up
Totango recommends you periodically tune up your Health Score to optimize the settings based on team feedback and ongoing learnings about the evolving usage patterns on your application.

Recommended tune ups:

1. 30 days after initial rollout of Totango
2. After significant product changes
3. Significant business or engagement model change

Adding Subjective CSM Risk Rating for High Touch Environments

For high touch customers, you may want to incorporate a subjective risk rating by the assigned CSM team member. This will allow the managing CSM to add their impression of the overall health of the account, based on relationship or other factors. For example, if a key stakeholder has left the company, or has given a negative feedback in a recent check-in call, the CSM may raise the account’s risk flag.

To build such a subjective rating, you must first have a place to capture the CSM input. This could be done by manually updating a custom List Type Account attribute using the following possible values: 

Make sure the CSM team regularly updates the field.

Use the following logic to add it to your scorecard. Remember: You should only use this for high-touch customers where the CSM can track this information for most of their accounts.

Health Calculation Order

In case an account is eligible for both good and poor health, Totango will assign poor health to this account. The system does this to ensure you are alerted to any potential issues as early as possible.

In the event that an account qualifies for more than one Health Profile, Totango will calculate the profiles in order of appearance. So if you are using profiles based on Lifecycle Stage (for example), make sure they are in the correct order in Health Designer. You can drag and drop to change the order of Health Profiles

Go to Create Health Profiles with Health Designer and get started.