Health score
What is a health score?
A health score is a rating that summarizes, in one number, how likely an account is to stay a customer. It combines usage, adoption and relationship signals (how many people log in, which features they use, how many tickets they open, how they respond) into a figure that can be sorted highest to lowest.
Also: account health · customer health score
A number nobody can explain is useless
The classic failure is building a formula with twelve weighted signals that outputs 72 out of 100 and that nobody can take apart. When the CSM cannot say why that account is at 72, they do not act: they look at the number, shrug, and carry on with their usual list. Three signals people understand are worth more than twelve they do not.
Why it matters
What it means for a SaaS
Because you cannot work a whole book equally. With forty accounts and one person, the only thing that decides the outcome is which ones get the time, and the health score is what turns that decision into something repeatable rather than a Monday morning hunch.
Health score in detail
Where to start
Three signals are enough for a first version: usage trend against last month, number of distinct people logging in, and days since the last meaningful contact. It calculates in a spreadsheet and already sorts the book better than intuition does.
The signal almost nobody includes
Whether the internal sponsor, the person who signed, is still showing up. A customer where the user changes and the sponsor disappears renews far worse than one with flat usage, and that signal is on no product dashboard.
Validating it against what already happened
A health score is only worth anything if it predicts. The way to check is applying it to the customers who left last year: if they were green three months earlier, the formula does not measure what you think.
How Intake handles it
Frequently asked questions
How many signals should a health score have?
As many as can each be explained in one sentence. Three well chosen work better than twelve weighted, because what matters is that whoever sees it knows what to do.
Is ticket count a useful signal?
Yes, but carefully: lots of tickets can mean the customer is stuck or that they are using it heavily. Tone and question type are more reliable than volume.
Related terms
These usually come up in the same conversation.
Churn
Churn is the percentage of customers, or of revenue, lost in a period. It is the metric that tells you whether a subscription business is growing or just standing still: with high churn, every new customer only fills the hole left by another.
NRR — Net revenue retention
Net revenue retention measures what a group of customers bills today against what they billed a year ago, counting what was lost to cancellations and contractions and what was gained from expansion by those same customers. It excludes new customers: it measures what the existing base does.
TTV — Time to value
The time between a customer signing up and the product solving, for the first time, the problem they paid for. It counts that first result that matters to them, not setup time or the first session, which are earlier steps and do not guarantee a renewal.
CSM — Customer Success Manager
A Customer Success Manager (CSM) is the person responsible for making sure a customer gets the outcome they signed up for. They work proactively across a book of accounts, own adoption, retention and expansion, and their success is measured in renewals, not in closed tickets.
Contact rate
Contact rate is how many support questions a business generates relative to its size: normally tickets per customer per month, or per hundred active customers. It is the metric that says whether support will grow at the pace of the business or choke it.
Retention playbook
A retention playbook is the written set of actions triggered by a specific account signal: what happens when usage drops two weeks running, when the sponsor stops replying, or when a renewal approaches. It turns into process what otherwise depends on who happens to be around that day.
