This is a guest post by Marley Wagner, head of customer success programs and strategy at EverHealth.

Quick summary: Your customers can log in every day and still fail to get what they bought. Score them across five dimensions instead: adoption, business outcomes, relationships, sentiment and support health.

One of the biggest misconceptions about health scores is that they’re designed to measure a customer’s activity when they should be designed to measure a customer’s success. A customer who logs in every day, attends every training session and opens every email isn’t necessarily healthy. Healthy customers are the ones who are achieving what they purchased your product to do. Effective health scores should combine inputs across multiple dimensions rather than relying on one category of data.

Think about health through the following five lenses. The right mix will likely vary based on industry, company size, maturity and how long the customer has been using your product. And while your health score doesn’t need to include every bullet, it can get you into the right mindset so you can narrow it down to what matters most in your environment.

Product adoption

Focus on:

- Are customers using the features that matter most to what they’re trying to accomplish?

- Have they adopted the workflows tied to business value as they define it?

- How quickly did they reach that value? (This might not be the same as how you internally measure time to value.

Whether customers use the standard, newest or most popular features matters less because that functionality may not apply to their goals.

Business outcomes

Focus on:

- Have they reached the success milestones established during onboarding?

- Are they seeing measurable return on investment (ROI)?

- Are they making progress toward the objectives they set when they started?

Following your process in a standard way isn’t required for success; CSMs should flag deviations as a trigger for outreach, but a different route doesn’t automatically mean a customer is at risk.

Relationships

Focus on:

- Are key stakeholders, including the executive sponsor, participating in strategic conversations?

- Do you have relationships beyond a single champion?

- Have there been any recent changes or departures among key contacts?

Having a quarterly business review (QBR) won’t tell you much on its own. Even if the right stakeholders attend, they need to engage for you to assess the relationship.

Customer sentiment

Focus on:

- What is the CSM hearing in conversations?

- How do executive stakeholders feel about the partnership?

- Are renewal conversations becoming more positive or more cautious?

CSAT captures a single moment, so it rarely gives a full picture. And by the time a bad NPS score comes in, it’s often too late to act.

Support and operational health

Focus on:

- Is onboarding progressing as expected and as mutually agreed upon?

- Are issues being resolved quickly and effectively if and when they arise?

- Are recurring problems preventing customers from realizing value?

Comparing ticket volume between churned and renewed accounts can sometimes reveal meaningful patterns, but the number itself matters less than how the tickets were resolved.