Chapter 8 Customer Experience and Success: Both Science and Art My second recommendation is to define a framework for assessing overall customer health. Call it a customer health scorecard, health dimensions, success domains, or whatever resonates with you and your customers. Your goal in this exercise is simple: Establish a set of criteria, beyond product usage, that at a glance can indicate whether the account is healthy and likely to renew. The concept of a health scorecard is often associated with more mature businesses. Startups often take a gut-check approach to this, but I believe it’s valuable very early on for two reasons: Internal Alignment Can you describe what a healthy customer looks like? This is one of the first probing questions I ask when meeting with startups. If you’re not aligned internally about what a healthy customer is, how do you acquire more? How do you avoid acquiring customers who aren’t the right fit for your business? How do you begin to learn what the flags are for an at-risk renewal? Without this alignment, the customer care team and all other individuals who come into contact with customers don’t know where to focus their attention and expertise to ensure healthy customers who want to renew and recommend your product to others. Customer Alignment and Value Perception Whether you do formal business reviews or ad hoc account check- ins with your customers, having a basic framework for the discussion can be a huge success factor and differentiator for your brand. Be transparent with your customers about your success criteria, and take time in the beginning to ensure you’re both aligned on those factors. This becomes the foundation for your account reviews going forward, and the benefits are multifaceted. It provides an organized and cohesive focus for account reviews. It provides a platform to highlight the value your product is delivering, and to position additional products and services that can address gaps. And it keeps customers honest about their expectations.