Key Factors of Health Score System in Customer Success

Abstract

SaaS vendors can struggle when the contract period with the customer comes closer to an end. The contract renewal should be done and there is not necessarily such visibility and in-formation on the customer account status and health. The optimal situation would be to know in advance will the partnership with the customer continue. For this dilemma, a Customer Health Score Tool brings a solution with a holistic view of the customer accounts since it is multiple times more expensive to acquire new customers compared to keeping the existing revenue running.

The commissioner of the thesis was a Finnish SaaS company operating in a B2B sector in the global space. The company has thousands of customers, and the contract renewals are the key to secure the existing revenue plus build growth on top of the existing.

Customer data was scattered in the commissioner organization and was not utilized to get value and insights of the customer statuses. Research questions set to bring understanding and usability of the customer health score data were: 1) How does the Customer Health Score tool output help in building better customer success? 2) How does the Customer Health Score tool output help the commissioner organization to work proactively and give predictive warnings of unwanted results? 3) How could the Customer Health Score tool secure the case company´s future revenue?

The thesis work utilizes quantitative data collected from the commissioner’s organization and qualitative data from the interviews the author conducted. There were interviews for the commissioner's organization's customers and internally in the commissioner´s organization. The thesis outcome convinces and confirms the need for the customer health tool for the commissioner and also generally for other SaaS business organizations. The thesis will support also decision-making when selecting the tool for the health score and Customer Success platform.