At the recent World Tour London, Salesforce shared some interesting information about the new customer success score. They use this internally as a signal for whether the customer is getting the best value from their licenses. A strong score suggests that the customer is happy with the platform and likely to renew.
This technology is available in Salesforce for Signature Success Plan customers only, but the concepts are interesting to understand for anyone who is working with subscribers and monthly recurring revenue (MRR) in Salesforce.
We have implemented standalone customer success platforms for other clients and these ideas are transferrable outside of the Salesforce world too.
Salesforce suggest they use following weighting on the individual scores;
Customer Success = Product Adoption (50%) + Customer Expertise (20%) + Technical Health (30%)
Anwaar Khan, Senior Customer Success Manager at Salesforce
Salesforce themselves join various systems (both internal and external) via their data cloud to create a unified profile. They also use their tableau (CRMA) product to package in a nice interactive user interface and display this via experience cloud.
As a Salesforce Managed Service Partner, what caught our eye the most is the massive 30% allocated to technical health. When was the last time you checked technical health within your Salesforce organisation and do you have the skills internally to maintain your system as needed?
If you want to build a customer health score in Salesforce we suggest the following options;
1 Manual scoring via formula fields. You need to define a small number of key health indicators and combine them in a formula. Consider weighting the indicators to ensure a balanced health score. A small number of input indicators reduces complexity but crucuially allows your account manager or customer success manager to simply spot why the health score is unhealthy and what action to take to help improve the customer health score.
2 Use Salesforce Data Pipelines (extra cost and certain editions only) to consume external data in realtime
3 Get a Salesforce customer signature success plan and use the technology directly
4 Ask us to help you define and build a customer success score!
Our advice is to keep it simple, as we’ve seen people overly complicate this many times and the value of this idea for the business is reduced greatly. See if you can deliver a solution quickly and iterate, if useful but not quite perfect.
Get in touch with ESLtech to discuss our annual managed service plan that will ensure the engine of your investment is tuned and ready to race. 🏎️