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Part of [[The Playbook]]. Before you can run a play, you need to know something's wrong. Observability is the monitoring layer of Customer Success: a customer health score that tells you the state of an account before the customer has to tell you themselves.
#REDIRECT [[Adopt]]
 
==What actually goes into a health score==
 
A health score that only measures sentiment is a lagging indicator dressed up as a dashboard. The useful ones combine:
 
* '''Product usage and adoption depth''' — not just "did they log in," but which features, how deep, and whether usage is trending up or down. This is the highest-weight signal, because usage drops before satisfaction scores do.
* '''Support signal''' — ticket volume and severity trend, not a raw count. A spike after a quiet stretch matters more than a steady baseline.
* '''Relationship and engagement''' — meeting attendance, response latency, whether the champion is still the champion or quietly changed jobs.
* '''Commercial signal''' — contract terms, upcoming renewal date, prior expansion or contraction history.
* '''CSM/TAM pulse''' — the qualitative gut-check from the human who actually talks to the account. Don't let the model override this; let it flag disagreement instead.
 
==Leading vs. lagging==
 
Leading indicators (usage decline, feature abandonment, unanswered emails) predict a problem before it's visible. Lagging indicators (a formal complaint, a support escalation, a churn notice) confirm a problem that's already arrived. A health score built entirely on lagging indicators is just a churn report with extra steps — weight leading indicators higher, and treat lagging indicators as confirmation, not discovery.
 
==Score bands and what they trigger==
 
A workable default, tuned per business:
 
{| class="wikitable"
! Band !! Meaning !! Action
|-
| 0–40 || Critical || [[Incident Response for At-Risk Accounts|Declare an incident]]
|-
| 41–60 || At-risk || Run the matching [[The Play Library|play]], proactively
|-
| 61–80 || Healthy || Standard cadence, no special action
|-
| 81–100 || Thriving || Flag for expansion, hand to the growth motion
|}
 
==What breaks health scores==
 
* '''Overcomplication.''' A score with 40 weighted inputs is a score nobody trusts and nobody can explain to a customer's exec sponsor. Fewer inputs, clearly defensible, beats a black box every time.
* '''Static snapshots.''' A single number hides the story. Track the trend — an account moving from 90 to 65 over three weeks is a different problem than one sitting at 65 for a year.
* '''Mistaking activity for engagement.''' Logins aren't adoption. A user opening the product every day to check one report they could get from an email digest is not a healthy account, even though the login graph looks great.
 
==Where this feeds==
 
The score sets the trigger for [[The Play Library]] and defines the target in [[SLOs for Customer Outcomes]]. When a score crosses into critical, it's the input to [[Incident Response for At-Risk Accounts]].
 
[[Category:Customer Success Manager]]
[[Category:Customer Engineering]]

Latest revision as of 18:07, 1 September 2026

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