How customer health scores can help every function succeed

Involve.ai customer BentoBox has gotten creative with their AI-driven health scores. As Lauren Byrd, Director of Customer Success for BentoBox shared in a recent community post, they pull their scores into their system of record and use them to inform everything from marketing decisions to sales outreach. Here are a few ways sharing customer health information across departments can benefit your business.
How different departments can use health scores
Customer Success - Traditional health score users, in non-traditional, strategic roles
Health scores and, more importantly, the leading indicators that impact customer health, are transforming Customer Success into a more proactive and strategic function than ever before.
By letting holistic data guide health scoring efforts, CS no longer relies on one-sided guesses at customer health. Rather, they have a meaningful metric for where and how to take action. Customer Success Managers (CSMs) are able to look at automated health scores - along with the leading indicators that comprised those scores - and have proactive, prescriptive conversations with their customers about how they could achieve more value.
Sales - Health scores as indicators of expansion
When sales teams have access to customer health scores, Account Managers and Account Executives have a simple way to identify customer upsell and cross-sell opportunities. They can work with CSMs to determine what specific areas need work or are delivering above and beyond value and target those areas to ensure healthy customers are eager not only to renew, but to grow their partnership.
Marketing - Letting health scores guide outreach
On the flip side, Marketers may not want to alienate struggling customers with tone deaf outreach. They can use health scores to determine which customers are right for campaigns, market research, and advocacy. At an even more meaningful level, they can compare customer health with specific product licenses and usage to determine whether specific products or features correlate with improved customer success.
Product - Building a roadmap that benefits customer health
Product Managers can take a similar approach to marketers when building out features. By checking health scores, they can identify specific customers for feedback: both positive and negative. They can also watch for changes in health after product releases and enhancements.
Revenue - Are health scores the new magic wand for forecasting?
Revenue leaders and Revenue Operations teams are responsible for accurate forecasting. With the help of predictive health scores, they have a way to forecast post-sale revenue in the quarters ahead - and encourage action where needed to ensure their forecasts come to fruition!
Ensuring access to health scores and alignment across teams
To successfully use health scores cross-functionally, teams need to be singing from the same songbook. The scores themselves need to be built on data from across the organization, not just from one team. And each team needs to have access to the scores as part of their workflow. If, for example, Sales uses Salesforce and CS uses Gainsight, scores need to be available to each team in those platforms, in a way that doesn’t require breaking from their flow of work.
Additionally, leaders across the company need to champion the value and importance of customer health, and the cross-functional benefits of maximizing it.
Involve.ai can help your company bring a strategy like this to life. Talk to us to learn more!