The health score is green and the customer churns anyway
Tuesday morning, the CS dashboard glows a friendly green. Account at 82 out of 100, trend stable, all green. By noon the cancellation is in the inbox. The CSM is completely blindsided. The score isn’t, it still shows 82.
How does a score like that come about, anyway? In most cases like this: two years ago the team sat in a workshop and handed out weights. Logins 30 percent, tickets 20, NPS 20, contract age 15, the rest gut feeling. Sounds reasonable, was never verified. Nobody afterwards took the actual cancellations and checked what the score was saying 90 days earlier. Yet that would be the only test that counts. A score that was never calibrated against real churn is not an early warning. It’s decoration with traffic-light colors.
The root problem sits deeper than the weights. Logins measure attendance, not value. A customer can log in every day because one single clerk pulls one single report, while the three departments the tool was bought for went back to Excel long ago. Conversely, there are accounts with meager login numbers that quietly and contentedly get exactly the one critical result they pay for. Attendance is cheap to measure, so everyone measures attendance. Value realization is inconvenient to measure, so almost nobody does: is the customer achieving the outcome they signed for? Is the feature that tipped the sales process actually being used? Are the users on board who were named as critical in the kickoff?
The way out is craft, not philosophy. Pull all cancellations from the last 24 months, lay the score history next to them. If the score stayed green until the very end for the majority of churns, the workshop weights go out the window. Then work backwards: which signals actually stood out among the churned customers three months earlier? Often it’s things like the core feature going unused, the champion leaving, an invoice recipient who suddenly starts asking questions. From that you build a score that predicts something. That’s a data project of a few days, not a strategy program.
A green dashboard reassures the team and the management. But reassurance is not a health score’s job. When did your score last see a cancellation coming before the customer said it out loud?
