Companies often measure their success based on the net new customer logos. As they mature and as they win more customers their focus eventually starts to shift towards retaining and renewing those customers through account management and driving customer success. Post-sales account management is not a new idea – but the data and tools used to manage existing customers are evolving on daily basis.
Traditional CRM platforms like Salesforce or Dynamics give organizations the basic tools to manage existing customers – but they lack insights into the health of the customer and whether or not they are happy customers or whether or not they are likely to renew or not. The reality is that there are innumerable data points that factor into a customer’s happiness and health – most of which are missing from CRM tools. Account managers often manage their customer accounts manually in spreadsheets and guess which customers are going to renew. Renewals are often based on the gut feeling of customer success reps and upsells are usually met with surprise when customers call or email with an inbound order.
Rather than relying on the gut-feelings of an overwhelmed account manager, companies should harness data to help their reps make decisions about how to best serve customers and accounts. One way of doing this is to develop a data-driven Customer Health or Account Health score to measure the happiness, engagement and likelihood of renewal of your customers. A simple Account Health Score can help your account managers and customer success reps prioritize their customers and quickly identify customers who are at-risk or likely to cancel.
Companies with large customer bases particularly struggle with account management because their reps are unable to talk to all of the users of every customer to gauge their health and/or happiness. As companies grow – the difficulties grow exponentially as their userbase grows.
Automation can also be used to notify reps when customers breach certain thresholds or customers could be flagged in CRM for upsell opportunities.
How Should I Calculate Customer Health Scores?
There are a variety of signals that can be use to inform and calculate an account health score. Most importantly first-party communication data can be used to determine the level of engagement in an account. By capturing and auto-logging sales rep email and calendar information the system can score engagement health based on the frequency of email communication, frequency of meetings held, the number of people engaged in emails and in meetings, the words used in communication – even the tone and sentiment of the words used in communication can all be used to inform the engagement score with a customer.
But account health score is determined by more than just email and meeting engagement with a sales rep. Other data signals that can be incorporated into customer health include: Billing data, Support tickets, Product usage, Product surveys, Customer feedback and Satisfaction/NPS. Each of these data signals can be calibrated to inform the customer’s account health.
For example, if a customer is late on Billing or if they’ve experienced a high number of support tickets – the score would reflect poor or waning health prompting automation or a sales rep to reach out to the customer and resolve the issues. Likewise, if an account has high product usage, low support tickets and high NPS scores, the account health would be positive and the customer would be ripe for a conversation about growing the account with additional products and services. A good account health scoring system can help companies stay ahead of churn and be proactive with their at-risk customers.
Understanding Stakeholders and Trends
Perhaps the greatest benefit of an automated account health score is that it enables account managers to quickly identify at-risk accounts as well as identifying any relationship gaps that exist in the account. Managing accounts, especially large accounts, requires reps to stay on top of multiple relationships with multiple stakeholders. The health of those relationships can be indexed and used to understand the level of engagement with each stakeholder and to identify supporters and detractors. By identifying and targeting disengaged stakeholders, the overall health of the account can be improved and risk can be reduced. A key element to measuring engagement is not only whether or not the account manager made a phone call or if sent an email, but whether or not the customer responded. Engagement should be based on response from both parties as well as the speed, frequency and tone of the response. Tone can be measured with NLP processing to determine whether the tone of the response is positive, negative, frustrated, happy, etc.
Leveraging Themes
In addition to Account Health score, SalesDirector.ai also provide an additional tool called Themes to help account managers and customer success reps manage accounts. Themes are deeper, more intensive insights that go beyond the Deal Insights most reps are accustomed to in SalesDirector.ai (or inside of their CRM). Themes analyze the words and intent being used by both the sales rep and the customer (via communication data) and group those words into families.
Themes and “families” would be the grouping of words and intent that revolve around Pricing, Discovery, Next Actions, Risk, Objections or Deal Progression.
With Themes, account managers have a tangible tool that guides and suggests next actions for the reps based on real data and real words used by the customer during engagement.
Account Health is a multi-faceted function that requires input from multiple sources. When done correctly, Account Health is a powerful tool to understand the true risk of your customer portfolio. Whether its identifying at-risk accounts, attempting to reduce churn, wanting to increase NRR, cross-sell or upsell – Account Health provides account managers and customer success reps with the tools they need to better understand their customers, their interactions and the future of their revenue.