Lead Scoring vs Customer Health Scoring

Lead scoring is a widely adopted methodology amongst sales and marketing organizations for ranking leads to determine their sales-readiness. You score leads based on the interest they show in your offerings, their current place in the buying cycle and their fit in regard to your business.

Lead scoring helps organizations know whether a prospect should be handed over directly to sales or if marketing should continue to nurture that lead. This threshold is usually determined by implementing a lead scoring model that incorporates demographic and firmographic attributes, like company size, industry, and job role; as well as behavioral factors like email opens, content downloads, and frequent web visits.

The main purpose of lead scoring to is increase sales productivity, increase the number of leads converted to opportunities, and decrease sales cycle times for qualified leads. These are all things sales and marketing leaders can get behind, right?

But what happens after that lead successfully goes through the sales funnel and becomes a customer?

Unfortunately, the reality is that most organizations rely on their lead scoring models to give them a gauge on their customers.  Although a lead score can still tell you how a customer is engaging with your company online and allow them to raise their hand for an upsell offer, it is not a full picture of where they stand with you in terms of customer maturity or likelihood to renew.

Lead scoring models are built and run in marketing automation platforms and that data is usually synced over to a CRM. The issue is that most organizations do not have a tie between their app/product or their customer service portals and their marketing automation platform. Without having this data synced in real-time to incorporate in a comprehensive scoring model, it is going to be inaccurate from a customer perspective.

Here’s some areas where lead scoring typically leaves a gap in customer insights:

• Product Usage – How often someone is logging in and the amount of time spent using the product are certainly factors that indicate whether a customer is finding value in the product and is likely to renew or not.
• Support History – How a customer is engaging with your support and customer success teams plays a big factor into their overall satisfaction with your company.
• Service Utilization – How much a customer is using your online resources, training and consulting services helps show their level of continued investment with your organization.
• Customer Feedback – When a customer is providing direct feedback either through a net promoter score (NPS) or a customer survey they are expecting that you are listening to and learning from their feedback and using that information to serve them better.

After you’ve spent all the time and resources on nurturing a lead to become a customer, it only makes sense ROI wise to put processes in place to make sure they become a happy and loyal customer moving forward.

So, what’s the solution? How do you get all of these data insights into one place for a deeper understanding of your customers? That’s where customer success platforms and customer health scoring comes in.

Customer health scoring is the process of evaluating a customer’s overall engagement and satisfaction with your company in a simple score. A customer health score is built and run in a customer success platform that syncs all of the data sources together – marketing automation platform, CRM, customer service platform, ticketing system, customer messaging platforms, and your own product/app.

Want to learn more about customer health scoring? Check out our new health scoring cheat sheet. In this cheat sheet you will find a complete description of health scoring and key terms to enrich your Customer Success vocabulary. You will also learn the distinction between quantitative and qualitative factors of health scores as well as health scoring tips and optimization techniques.

Stay tuned for more Customer Success Cheat Sheets to come!

Customer Success Around the Web

• Five Effective Ways to Better Measure Customer Retention – With the average value of a lost customer hovering around $243 globally, according to a report by Kissmetrics, failing to retain customers can be costly for your company. Putting a measurement system in place to ensure you hold onto clients and better manage their overall retention can be a cost-effective game changer. Read five tips for better customer retention measurement at Forbes.com.

• How to Create the Right Customer Health Score – Businesses have been putting the customer at the center of their strategy for decades. Adopting a customer-centric strategy, businesses are building their company around the customer to ensure their customers remain satisfied with the relationship and receive value from their products and services. Check out this post on customerthink.com to formalize a set of standards you can use to develop the right customer health score.

• Scaling Customer Service as Your Startup Grows – As your startup grows, what your customers expect from you will change and the volume of their requests will change. You’ll shift from the reactive mode of supporting requests as they happen to the proactive mode of fixing issues before they ever become a problem. Continue reading at the Harvard Business Review for some recommendations for shifting your thinking about customer success as you grow.