Got a health score model made of nearly three dozen variables that no one on your team uses, let alone trusts? You’re not alone.
Health scores are nothing new, yet still underutilized. Possibly because most are overly complicated, not true to real-life, and poor predictors of churn as a result.
That doesn’t mean you should throw the baby out with the bathwater, though. You just need a health score model you can trust and use to make intelligent decisions.
In this guide, we’ll break down the best software available to Customer Success teams to help you collect data, calculate a health score you can trust, and make decisions at scale.
What Goes into a Good Health Score?
We know you’re anxious, but before we list out the top software platforms for you to review, let’s level set on what goes into a smart health score and what to look for in software to help you track it.
It doesn’t take long browsing Reddit to find CS professionals voicing the following frustrations:
- “We built a health score with 30 variables. No one on the team trusted it.”
- “The model was owned by data science, and we couldn’t even explain it to our CSMs.”
- “We stopped reporting the score altogether until we had something actionable.”
While the complaints are numerous, they can be boiled down into two camps: “it’s too complicated” or “no one uses it.” In either case, health scores are pretty much useless at best and a waste of everyone’s time at worst.
Smart CSM teams know that they can only get so far by trusting their gut, and you’re going to need a system to track customers if you manage CS at scale. The key, then, is to develop a health score model that you can actually trust and use.
That starts with your data – though you’ll see the platform you pick will heavily influence your experience. To collect that data, you should look for software that brings in:
- Product usage (or lack thereof). This should include login frequency and feature adoption.
- Meeting attendance and email responsiveness.
- Support interactions (number of tickets, ticket frequency, escalations).
- Customer-specific traits like segment, renewal date, and revenue.
- Communication history and sentiment. This can include the tone of your conversations, mentions of competitors, budget changes, or whatever you think is a relevant risk signal.
You can learn more about what to include in your health score model here. Now you know what to look for, so let’s review the top flexible customer health tracking software.
The Best Health Score Software for Customer Success Teams
We chose the following software platforms based on their features, user reviews, and G2 ratings. The best health score software platforms we found are:
Vitally is one of the leading Customer Success Platforms (CSPs), offering a unique blend of deep data capture, powerful AI features, and a focus on UX and ease of use.
Remember, it’s not just the software you choose, but the data you feed it. Vitally offers plenty of integrations and an API to pipe in all of your data into a flexible, no-code health score engine that allows you to define scoring rules based on any combination of metrics, traits, activities, or events.
That means you can build your own scoring model to factor in:
- Product usage
- Communication
- Subscription history
- Support data
You also have the freedom to weigh these inputs differently to build a fully personalized score model that matches your customer type and business. These scores aren’t just an amalgamation of different datapoints; they’re contextual thanks to key success metrics like goal completion, custom traits, and AI-driven insights.
Armed with a wealth of data and real-time updates, your team will be able to spot trends, respond to risks, and deliver a stellar customer experience at scale without missing a beat (or sleep).
And customers agree, here’s what one reviewer has to say on G2:
“The ease of implementation was incredible. We were up and running within a few short weeks. I also appreciate the ease of integration with the data we wanted to import into Vitally. We've been able to improve our efficiency and reduce the number of spreadsheets we were previously using. The ability to weight health scores based on customer type has improved our health score accuracy.”
In addition to health score monitoring, Vitally includes features like:
- AI Copilot
- Blueprints and templates
- Automation
- Project management
- Custom surveys
- Dashboards and reporting
- NPS and CSAT tracking
ChurnZero is a legacy CSP that offers a highly flexible health score model with AI-powered features to help CS teams automate their processes at scale.
ChurnZero brands its healthscores as “ChurnScores,” which allow you to measure and monitor the health of your accounts using any metric that you choose. This includes things like:
- Account attributes
- Engagement and communication history
- Product usage data
- Risk factors
- Support history
And more. That said, while ChurnZero is highly flexible, it can be a bit more complex than some of the other platforms on this list. As one G2 reviewer notes:
“I find the churn score calculation in ChurnZero to be confusing. It can be difficult to explain to others, and it sometimes lacks clarity because the standard is not intuitive. For instance, understanding whether a higher or lower score indicates better customer health is not immediately apparent, which makes it harder for others to grasp the concept.”
Totango is another solid, albeit more enterprise-centric, option for CS teams looking to unify their data and turn it into customer insights.
Totango lets you view a snapshot of an account’s health and review it over time to see how it changes. These snapshots are color-coded for “good,” “average,” and “poor.” To build these scores, Totango offers two model options:
- Multidimensional: This model allows you to fine-tune and weight the factors used to calculate your score.
- Account: This is a simpler model you can set up using a starter profile.
The multidimensional model is most comparable to Vitally and ChurnZero, as it allows you to set and weight factors like support interactions, onboarding, risks, and more. Specifics such as product and subscription data are not mentioned. Totango’s documentation mentions that scores update daily, but does not mention whether they update in real-time based on customer actions.
Gainsight is the heavyweight on this list, as one of the top enterprise platforms for Customer Success teams.
Gainsight is a data-collection powerhouse, allowing you to pull customer and product data under one roof for advanced analysis. Gainsight packages its healthscores into “Scorecards” for an account, which allows you to set up custom health scores based on:
- Support interactions
- Renewal chances
- Product usage
Gainsight’s AI features are primarily powered by its acquisition of Staircase, which provides customer intelligence from real-time sentiment, potential risks, and helpful alerts for every customer, based on your data and communications history.
Gainsight is a fantastic tool, but it's best suited for enterprise use cases – for small- and mid-market teams, the complexity and price tag make it overkill.
Like many others on this list, Custify is a comprehensive and user-friendly CSP that offers a variety of features for CS teams.
Custify positions itself as a lightweight alternative to legacy platforms such as Gainsight and ChurnZero, with a focus on small- and mid-market SaaS companies. Like others on this list, Custify offers automated health scores that provide timely alerts when scores change. The exact factors that feed these scores and the level of customization are not mentioned, though it can be assumed that the emphasis on automation and simplicity leaves little room for customization.
Compare These Health Tracking Tools Side-by-Side
We’ve covered a lot so far! Here’s a quick overview of the platforms we shared above so you can make the right decision for your team:
Ultimately, the choice between these platforms depends on your goals, team size, technical proficiency, and budget. If you ask us, Vitally is one of the best choices for innovative and fast-moving CS teams that live by their data and value the ability to design health scores their way rather than fight with their tools.
Why Innovative Customer Success Teams Trust Vitally
Between the five tools above, you have some great options. We cannot speak directly to all of them, but we can share why innovative CS teams consistently choose Vitally to power their workflow:
- Data you can trust
- Real-time capabilities
- Customizable without code
Data You Can Trust
If you’re giving your health score model a partial picture of your customers, then it’ll be incomplete at best.
Vitally stands out among other Customer Success Platforms due to its ability to bring all of your data – product usage, subscription data, communications history, support data, and much more – under one roof for deep analysis.
As one customer puts it:
“In just one year, Vitally has fundamentally transformed our Partner Success organization, moving us from disparate, manual processes to a unified, data-driven platform. It has truly become the central nervous system for all our customer-facing activities.”
With Vitally, your CS org has every data point it needs to make strategic decisions at scale.
Real-Time Capabilities
When revenue is on the line, you need churn risk signals now, not by the end of the day or once per week.
Vitally’s real-time capabilities give you the right data in the exact right moment you need it. And with automated triggers and playbooks, you can proactively send timely messages to fight churn rather than reactively. When a customer stops logging in after a few weeks, you’ll know. When an account adopts a new feature, you’ll know.
And the best part is, it’s all automated.
Customizable Without Code
Thanks to AI, fewer CS teams are truly building their health scores from scratch. But many still require complex setups, time-consuming configuration, and data piping from multiple sources.
When you need to feed usage data, support data, escalations, emails, call transcripts, and any other format you could think of, it’s easy for your health score to turn into a bloated mess of datapoints.
Vitally’s no-code healthscore builder completely eliminates that. By connecting your data sources to Vitally, you can finetune and weight score factors in-app to build a truly personalized health score model without a line of code or the help of a developer.
See Why 600+ CS Teams Love Vitally: Take a Platform Tour
The five platforms above offer a suite of tools to build a health score model and fuel it with your product and customer data, but only Vitally provides a highly flexible, easy-to-use, and fast-to-implement platform for innovative Customer Success teams.
With powerful automation features, seamless integrations, and a flexible API, Vitally is the top choice for innovative Customer Success teams looking to build a CS process tailored to their customers' unique needs.
To see how top-performing companies build a winning Customer Success org, schedule a demo of Vitally or explore our free platform tour today!
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