Customer Health Score
A customer health score is a composite metric that combines multiple signals — product usage, feature adoption, support interactions, payment history, and engagement — into a single indicator of account health. It helps you predict which customers are likely to churn before they cancel.
Why Customer Health Score Matters for SaaS Companies
By the time a customer hits the cancel button, you have already lost them. Customer health scoring gives you weeks or months of advance warning, turning reactive retention into proactive intervention. For Seed to Series B companies with limited customer success resources, health scores help you focus attention on the accounts that need it most.
An Operator's Take
You do not need a $50K customer success platform to build a health score. At BatchService, we built ours with a spreadsheet and four signals: login frequency (weekly active users), core feature usage (were they using the primary value feature?), support ticket sentiment (escalations vs. routine), and billing health (payment failures, overdue invoices). We weighted them, scored each account 1-100, and flagged anything below 40 for immediate outreach. Within 3 months we caught 73% of at-risk accounts before they reached the cancellation page.
Common Mistakes
What I see go wrong at Seed to Series B companies.
Over-engineering the health score with too many signals. Start with 3-5 signals that actually correlate with churn in your data. Add complexity later.
Weighting all signals equally. Login frequency might be a stronger predictor than support tickets for your product. Let your churn data tell you which signals matter most.
Building a health score without a response playbook. Knowing an account is at risk is useless without a defined intervention process.
Not validating the score against actual churn outcomes. Backtest your health score against historical data before relying on it.
What to Do This Week
Concrete steps you can take right now.
Identify 3-5 signals available in your existing data that might predict churn: login frequency, feature usage, support contacts, billing status.
Pull these signals for your last 20 churned accounts. Look for patterns in what changed in the 60-90 days before cancellation.
Build a simple scoring model (even in a spreadsheet) and apply it to your current customer base. Flag accounts scoring below threshold for outreach.
Use the Growth Diagnostic to identify whether retention infrastructure is your biggest growth bottleneck.
Related Resources
Try These Tools
Further Reading
Frequently Asked Questions
What signals should a customer health score include?
Start with four categories: product engagement (login frequency, feature usage, time in app), support experience (ticket volume, escalations, CSAT), financial health (payment history, overdue invoices), and relationship signals (NPS responses, champion changes). Weight each based on correlation with historical churn in your data.
Do you need expensive tools for customer health scoring?
No. You can build an effective health score with a spreadsheet, your product analytics, and your billing system. Most Seed to Series B companies should start simple — 3-5 signals, scored 1-100 — before investing in platforms like Gainsight or Totango. The playbook (what you do when a score drops) matters more than the tool.
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