Customer health index is a crucial metric to look at.

Why?

The customer’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) was in the highest percentile, yet I found myself closing the account. How did we miss this churning customer? Were there early warning signs we’d failed to notice?

I used to work as a technical customer service representative for an environmental testing laboratory. It was my job to keep an eye on the accounts I handled. I needed to make sure the customers were happy and meeting their goals with us. For this, we relied heavily on NPS scoring, but this measure was failing us.

NPS scoring could be failing you, too.

The problem is that NPS metrics give reactive, snapshot values. Plus there are other aspects to an account’s health beyond customer satisfaction. For instance, you need to understand your customer’s goals and whether they’re on track to meeting those goals.

According to McKinsey and Company, perfecting account health scoring can improve client retention by up to 95%. If I knew this, I could have prevented that one account from churning.

In this Process Street article, we introduce a more comprehensive and proactive means of determining the health of your accounts: the customer health index (CHI).

• What is a customer health index?
• Why you should transition from NPS to CHI
• How to calculate a customer health index in 4 steps

Let’s jump right to it!

To excel at customer success, you need to understand your customer health score. According to a study by Gartner, 88% of Account Managers (CSMs) think they can grow by delivering a great service, which is reflected in your customer health score measures.

A customer health score is a metric used to determine whether customers are healthy or at-risk of dropping off. Customers with high health scores are high-value, repeat customers – this comes hand-in-hand with business growth.

In this Process Street article, we give you 7 vital indicators you need for determining customer health. We then explain how you can use these indicators to calculate customer health score values, before looking at examples of customer health scoring in practice.

Click on the relevant subheader to jump to your section of choice, alternatively scroll down to read all we have to say.

• Our secret source: 7 indicators for calculating customer success
• Calculating your customer health score
• Customer health scoring in practice
• Moving from a startup to big business and how this alters customer health score measures

Let’s start scoring!

When thinking of the world’s most popular brands, which ones come to mind? In Forbes’ annual list of the World’s Most Valuable Brands, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and (META) Facebook are identified as some of the top-performing companies, with earnings being a key indicator of their success.

But while revenue may be a significant proof point of industry viability, how you approach your customer experience is another metric that gauges the future prosperity of a business. And one that has an equally significant say in how your business fares in the future.  

In Aircall’s report, Putting Your Customer First, we found that more than 50% of customers stopped supporting a business after a poor customer experience. This shows just how impactful a negative customer experience can be, undoing potentially years of customer loyalty in a single interaction. 

On the flip side, though, a positive customer experience can make a profound impression on people and go a long way to securing brand loyalty in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Either way, customer experience and going all out to impress your audience is one area you cannot afford to neglect. 

To make sure your strategy is as impactful as possible, this Process Street post will cover these five tried-and-tested ways to improve your customer experience below: 

• Be responsive to customer needs
• Provide multiple communication channels
• Follow up with your customers
• Value customer insights – good & bad
• Promote customer testimonials
• Perfecting your customer-first strategy

Since 2015, Nahla Davies has been working with enterprise clients around the world developing RegTech protocols and best practices. She’s also worked with both enterprise and sovereign governments as a key contributor for notable public projects like DCOM.

If the pandemic has shown the world anything, it’s that business professionals and, specifically, marketers can still meaningfully engage customers in an increasingly digital world. It’s undoubtedly challenging for marketers to continue providing a seamless customer experience across different digital channels such as social media.

Thankfully, though, factors such as artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics can make multi-channel customer experiences engaging across the entire customer journey — from product consideration all the way to purchase.

Businesses have proven themselves both capable and willing to remain adaptable amidst the tumultuous COVID pandemic in order to understand business problems and subsequent opportunities. The process of actually understanding these problems and opportunities, however, isn’t exactly straightforward.

Analytics, data, and artificial intelligence have the potential to enrich marketers’ understanding of their customers’ experiences in order to deliver meaningful, relevant experiences in the future. To that end, let’s quickly take a look at how data and analytics can be invaluable for marketers interested in enhancing the complete customer journey that they provide across different digital channels.

• Tailored strategies enhance customer experiences
• Analytics and data-driven personalization
• Automation increases time for customer interaction
• Chatbots are becoming more useful than ever to customers
• AI & data analytics: The trend that keeps growing

Let’s jump in!
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“Overall, [Process Street has] made a world of difference inside the organization. It’s really helped our quality and keeps our customers happy.” – David Schenz, Director

ERP Suites helps enterprise companies implement scalable IT solutions for secure data, improved response times, and application of industry knowledge & best practices.

The company began its very humble start in 2006 with a few guys in a basement with a vision. By 2017, ERP Suites had grown into an award-winning company known for its IT solutions and innovations.

Currently, they meet the needs of over 250 mid-size organizations within the US and abroad.
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The customer lifecycle begins with awareness and matures to advocacy, from the first interaction with your brand, to an evangelized super-user who raves about and recommends your product to friends, family and associates.

This Process Street article focuses on the customer lifecycle management – how to understand the different stages of the customer’s lifecycle, and guide them from initial awareness to long-term advocacy, with the help of tech.

Optimal customer lifecycle management is vital as this can maximize customer lifetime value (CLV) by boosting customer retention. This, in turn, will bolster your bottom-line by:

1. Selling to an existing customer base: There’s a 60-70% chance of selling to an existing customer base relative to a 5-20% chance of selling to new prospects.
2. Increasing customer retention: A mere 5% increase in customer retention is enough to raise a company’s profits by 75%.

Getting customer lifecycle management right can be tough. To help you, we’ve put together this list of essential tools to complete your customer lifecycle software stack, for optimal customer lifecycle management.

Each tool is chosen as per the customer lifecycle stage it’s best used for. Each customer lifecycle stage will have differing aims, which means it’s vital you use the right tools to meet your objectives. For this article, we’ve done the work for you.

• Understanding the customer lifecycle in detail
• Customer lifecycle software to help build brand awareness
• Customer lifecycle software to promote customer engagement
• Customer lifecycle software to ease customer evaluation
• Customer lifecycle software to help your customers make a purchase
• Customer lifecycle software tools to use post-purchase
• Customer lifecycle software tools to promote customer advocacy

Let’s dive right in!
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Nahla Davies is a software developer and tech writer. Before devoting her work full time to technical writing, she managed – among other intriguing things – to serve as a lead programmer at an Inc. 5,000 experiential branding organization whose clients include Samsung, Time Warner, Netflix, and Sony.

Allocation of marketing resources is the key problem which leadership teams in marketing departments are continually trying to solve.

Often we talk about PPC vs organic, brand vs conversion, SEO vs social, or any such pairing of activities. But maybe the biggest question at the top of the decision tree is: Acquisition vs Retention.

Should you try to generate more revenue from existing customers? Should you spend more effort to develop new customers? Or is there a happy medium that will work perfectly for your business?

Based on statistics alone, your existing customers are your best bet for new revenue. It is generally easier and less costly to rely on the people you have already built relationships with. But businesses that don’t take sufficient steps to bring new blood into their base will inevitably die.

In this Process Street article, we’ll attempt to answer some questions, namely:

How involved should marketing be in retention efforts? And how do different company structures or products impact that? How do we weigh those efforts against acquisition – the primary function of marketing?

To help you through the process, we’ll be looking at:

• How other companies divide their efforts between acquisition and retention
• Why do businesses spend so much on new customer acquisition?
• How should you divide your marketing spend between acquisition and retention?
• Putting it all together with process

Let’s get rolling!
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Joanne Camarce is a digital marketing expert specializing in SEO, eCommerce, and social media. She loves meeting new people and embraces unique challenges. When she’s not wearing her marketing hat, you’ll find Joanne fine-tuning her art and music skills.

80% of consumers say that customer experience is just as important as the products or services that a company provides.

Employees and new hires must have the skills to create positive experiences that bring customers back and get them to spread the word about your brand.

This is where people intelligence comes in.

People intelligence isn’t just a buzzword or a passing fad. 71% of organizations now see it as a high priority.

But what does people intelligence mean, and how can you apply it in your company?

In this Process Street blog post, we’ll look at the following:

• What is people intelligence?
• How can you apply people intelligence
• How can improving customer service boost your bottom line?
• Tips for building your company’s people intelligence

Let’s dive in!
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Companies with a customer-centric account health scoring system enjoy a 95% increase in customer retention.

To be more customer-centric, you need an account health scorecard that takes a holistic approach to measure your health and your customers’ health. In this Process Street article, we’ll show you how to do that.

We’ve produced your ultimate workflow guide to help you create this account health scorecard. This template is free for you to use from your Process Street account (you can sign up to create your free account here). This workflow guide has been produced based on the Customer-Centric Digital Transformation report by Deloitte.

You’ll also learn the key benefits you’d expect from taking this holistic approach to measuring an account’s health, with two real-life case studies.

This article is structured as follows:

• Create an account health scorecard that measures customer and business success
• Why you need an account health scorecard
• Case studies: Applying the account health scorecard approach in real life

Let’s get started!
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According to Deloitte Insights, advances in technology are changing the business landscape and they are calling this a digital disruption. This is altering customer expectations and demands, presenting critical challenges for customer success teams globally.

To successfully ride this wave of change, Deloitte – and us here at Process Street – believe businesses should rethink how they are measuring value delivered to the customer. The aim is to ensure these measurements are customer-centric to refine CS activities and enhance the customer’s experience.

Think of it as a customer success evolution in response to digital disruption.

This CS transformation has the potential to bolster positive referrals by 83%, lower costs by 20%, and increase customer lifetime value by x1.6.

What have you got to lose?

In this article, you’ll learn how to apply a customer-centric means of measuring customer value generated for your organization. I’ve split the process down into three steps based on the Customer-Centric Digital Transformation report by Deloitte.

• From churn reduction to customer value generation (applying customer success 2.0)
• Measuring value in 3 steps: Determining customer and internal success
• Determining value generated – Step #1: Measure the outside-in value perception
• Determining value generated – Step #2: Measuring inside-out value perception
• Determining value generated – Step #3: Measuring internal success using business outcomes

With that said, let’s jump straight to it!
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