● Customer Success · Instrument 05 · v1.1
The Customer Health Score
Four components, three colors, one rule. How much does this account resemble a successful customer at its stage — and which play does the answer name. The manual, and the scorecard that is the instrument.
Why it matters
The Voice of the Customer says what the customer tells us. This instrument says what the customer shows us: a classification of how successful the relationship is, from a minimum viable set of data, in three colors a whole company can read. Customer Success uses it as an early warning system; everyone else uses it to prioritize, decide and forecast without asking the account owner what’s happening. It rests on one claim: health is most predictive in the first ninety days after onboarding, because that is where most churn originates.
What’s inside
What health is. The base and expanded definitions; actionable and consolidated; the signs we see — what the customer tells us, shows us, and agrees with us.
Three colors, one rule. Green, Yellow, Red, and what each asks you to do. Fail-to-Red: any component in a fail state makes the account Red and names the play. Resemblance, the number beside the color, for trend only.
The four components. Adoption from the product, business outcomes from the CSM, customer operations from the queue and the invoice, feedback from the survey — the question each asks, its source, and an example threshold.
Stage profiles and the exemplar. Onboarding, Hypercare, Established, Renewal. Not all customers are measured equally: the score is how much this account, now, resembles a Green customer at its stage, drawn from your own Green pool. Hypercare as a touch, not a tier.
The thresholds and the scorecard. The Profiles tab as shipped, by stage; eight rows of the invented book with the rule at work; the Book tab.
What we do with the answer. Each signal names one of the Operating Model’s four plays; the touch grid; the 80/20 expectation. The plays, in health terms. What causes poor health — three causes, all controllable.
Teach it in an hour. The lesson plan: objectives, prerequisites, minute by minute, and the closing exercise. Standing it up, and the checklist.
How to use it
Read the manual once. Open the workbook and set the Profiles tab from your own renewed-and-grown accounts, one row per stage. Put every account on the Scorecard with its stage and fill the blue cells from the four sources. Review the Book tab every Monday: Reds first, then Hypercare, then plays due. Argue with the thresholds every quarter.
Provenance
Devised in 2018 as Senior Director of Customer Success at a hospitality-software company in the Vista Equity portfolio: a team-wide presentation, “Customer Health — Measuring a Customer’s Success,” and the lesson plan for teaching it in an hour. Rebuilt here as a Juan.co instrument: the fail-to-Red rule and the stage exemplar written out, the plays named as the Operating Model names them, and the scorecard workbook built with example thresholds and an invented book.