In the customer relationship management arena, health scores were to be the guiding light for Customer Success Managers (CSMs) to more effectively engage, proactively serve, and retain customers for the long term.

But here's the bad news: legacy customer health scores are not serving your CSM team.

In spite of the color-coded metrics and dashboards, far too many CSMs remain blindsided by surprise churn, last-minute escalations, or ghosted stakeholders. The issue isn't with the CSMs but with the legacy model of assessing "health."

Let's take apart what's broken—and what a contemporary, contextual approach should be.

The Issue with Traditional Health Grades

Most historical customer health scores are

• Slow: They use static metrics (such as NPS or last login) refreshed weekly or monthly. That's too slow in an era where customer opinions change on a daily basis.
• Surface-Level: A green score can look great on the surface—but it never tells you if the executive sponsor has checked out, or if usage has crashed for key features.
• One-Size-Fits-All: An onboarding metrics scorecard may not be suitable for renewal-stage customers, but most systems have the same template across the lifecycle.
• Opaquely Weighted: Scoring logic tends to be a highly black box, with CSMs left in the dark as to what matters most—and what to do about it.

The Cost of Getting It Wrong

• A misleading health score not only causes churn—it breaks trust in the system.
• CSMs spend time second-guessing the data or following their own ad-hoc signals.
• Leadership loses faith in forecasts, particularly when "healthy" accounts turn over.
• Customers notice the delay—they have to repeat issues that weren't previously flagged, and their expectations aren't met.
• In short, stale health scores break the loop of feedback among product usage, support signals, and customer intent.

What a New Health Score would be

In order to enable CSMs and hold accounts for good proactively, health scores must transform from gauges to intelligence. Here's how:

1. Real-Time Signal Integration

The systems now draw on real-time information from product usage, support requests, stakeholder interactions, sentiment analysis, and CRM interactions. That allows CSMs to spot red flags in advance.

2. Lifecycle Stage Contextual Scoring

What's important in onboarding (time-to-value, feature adoption) is distinct from what's important in renewal (business results, champion adoption). Health scoring must differ depending on where the customer is in their workflow.

3. Clear, Actionable Insights

The top scores don't simply indicate what's incorrect—they indicate why, and recommend what to do next. For instance:

"Core feature use declined by 30% within 2 weeks. Executive stakeholder did not log in. Book re-alignment call."

4. Collaborative & Flexible

CSMs must be able to deliver qualitative feedback—i.e., a change in team makeup or meeting environment—that the system uses to augment the score, but not replace it.

Your Team Deserves Better Than Guesswork Your CSMs are value advocates, growth promoters, and relationship creators. But they can't perform at their best if they're flying blind or running after ghosts. By making customer health scores current to reflect real-time, contextual signals, you're not just optimizing metrics—you're allowing your team to send the right message, to the right person, at the right time. And that's the type of intelligence that fuels retention, expansion, and trust.

Ready to move beyond legacy health scores? Start with a system built for today's customer complexity—not yesterday's metrics.