Whether you manage a SaaS customer base of 10, 1,000, or 10,000, you will need a consistent way to track its health. There is software to help you do this at scale, so if you are at or near the many hundreds of customers mark, I hope you have that.

However, a surprising number of companies still manually calculate customer health scores, having their customer success managers handle the task. And even more don’t manage or monitor customer health at all.

Regardless of which approach you are using—software, manual, or none at all—you can’t manage a SaaS customer base of any size without a consistent process. A customer health score combines several key metrics or activities into a single “score” to indicate the customer’s overall health.

Here are some of my suggestions for customer health scores.

Decide on your customer health scoring criteria

What makes for a healthy customer, or an at-risk customer? What behaviors exist in these customers? What events or triggers can you see? Take a look at the activity, actions and usage that indicate customer health. Here are some to consider:

• Customer pays (for freemium products)
• Customer uses product with X frequency
• Customer uses high-value feature(s)
• Customer account has X number of users
• Customer account includes multiple key stakeholders
• Customer account includes executive-level relationships
• Customer has desired outcomes met
• Customer is using support resources
• Customer is active participant in community
• Customer has explicitly stated their satisfaction (not a fan of this one, but…)

You can also include some “at risk” flag for scoring as well, for example:

• Lost customer stakeholder
• Lack of adoption of key high-value features
• Business event occurred (such as customer being acquired or an executive team being replaced)