Whether it’s losing a key account or not meeting internal growth goals, the last thing you need in uncertain times is an unpleasant surprise from a key customer. That means you have to keep your finger on the pulse of your accounts, regularly tracking customer engagement through an account health score.
So how do you do that? In this post, we’ll look at 3 ways to quantify account health, from the fastest but most subjective to the most comprehensive, data-driven, and time-consuming.
However you track account health, keep these best practices in mind:
And remember, the methods below aren’t mutually exclusive. Your ongoing evaluation of account health might include a mix of all 3, supported by your teams and your tech.
Pros: This is the quickest, easiest way to get a sense of account health.
Cons: It’s not very precise.
The fastest way to get a high-level read on your accounts is to ask the people who have direct customer contact. This could be key account managers (or strategic account managers, depending on the terminology your organization uses) or customer success managers. You might also reach out to the sales and customer service teams — again, anyone with frequent, direct customer contact should be able to give you, on a scale of 1-100, a general sense of the health of the account.
Since this assessment is already imperfect and subjective, it’s important to provide guidance to anyone who’s evaluating account health in this way. Let them know it’s a scale of 1-100, and you’re looking at the sum total of indicators such as:
Start by asking individual team members to complete their assessment of a specific account. If you see consistent scoring among several individuals, that’s a good sign the scores are stable. If you see widely disparate scores from different customer-facing roles, it’s time to convene everyone to discuss the discrepancies.
Pros: With the right technology, objective data is readily available
Cons: While this method can show you if you’re doing the right things, it can’t tell you how well you’re doing them (or not)
Adding a measure of leading indicators is a more objective layer to add to your account health assessment. In the context of account health scoring, leading indicators are the behaviors that build customer engagement. These are the default leading indicators we track in Kapta, and include:
Combining Method 1 (personal assessments) with Method 2 (objective leading indicators) is a good way to gut-check both the health of the account and the realism of your people. That’s not to say they’re misleading you when they say their accounts are healthy. It’s just using data the way data was intended: To cross-check intuition against hard numbers. As always, both are important when it comes to understanding the strength of your customer relationships.
Pros: The most comprehensive and accurate view of account health
Cons: Requires long lead time and purpose-built infrastructure
The gold standard for assessing account health is to track both leading and lagging indicators. Lagging indicators go beyond checking the box (are you doing the right things?) to evaluating the output (how well are you doing them?). Lagging indicators are specific to each account, and would include both KPIs for your customers, as well as KPIs for your own organization. In other words, lagging indicators track how successful you have made your customers, and in turn, how much organic growth you’ve driven through your efforts.
With a customer-centric lens on lagging indicators, we’d track things like:
Purpose-built tech platforms for key account management, such as Kapta, can track lagging indicators based on your readiness to do so and the data you’re able to collect frequently, reliably, and accurately. Kapta works with each client to establish and track specific KPIs for their accounts.
Account health scoring is critical for any B2B organization. Of course, it’s not enough to simply track account health — you also need to act on what you learn. If your accounts are scoring high, you need to capitalize on that by learning even more about your customers, and finding new and better ways to meet their needs so you’re not leaving money on the table. If your accounts are scoring mid-range or low, you need an action plan in place to correct the deficit, before it’s a crisis.
When you have a consistent, comprehensive, and accurate view of your accounts, you can make better plans — even in uncertain economic times. To see how Kapta can help you understand, track, and promote account health, schedule a personal demo today.