Health Score Builder: Diagnose Your Customers Like a Pro

What Is This Magical New Feature?

The Health Score Builder is HubSpot's latest addition to the Customer Success workspace, designed to transform how you monitor and nurture your customer relationships. Think of it as a sophisticated early warning system that takes all those scattered data points about your customers and rolls them up into a single, actionable score.

This isn't just another vanity metric to ignore. The Health Score Builder weighs different contact properties and activities based on what matters most to your business, then automatically calculates a health score for each company. The result? A clear, at-a-glance indicator of customer health that appears right on the company record.

As HubSpot's knowledge base explains, "You can identify trends or potential risks within your customer base by creating a health score in the Customer Success workspace. This score can help your teams analyze data about contacts and companies so you can efficiently grade customers based on the score you've tailored to your business's priorities."

Why Should You Care?

If you've ever felt like your customer success team is drowning in data without actually gaining insights, you're not alone. The typical CS team has access to mountains of information—engagement metrics, support tickets, NPS scores, usage data—but connecting those dots manually is about as fun as doing your taxes while riding a unicycle.

The Health Score Builder solves this problem by:

1. Predicting churn before it happens: Spot the warning signs of unhappy customers before they ghost you
2. Identifying upsell opportunities: Recognize which customers are thriving and might be ready for more
3. Prioritizing your team's efforts: Focus on the customers who actually need attention, not just the loudest ones
4. Creating consistency: Establish a standardized way to evaluate customer health across your organization
5. Saving precious time: Automate what used to be a manual, spreadsheet-heavy process

Setting Up Your Health Score (It's Easier Than You Think)

Getting started with the Health Score Builder is refreshingly straightforward. Here's the quick version:

1. Define what "healthy" means for your business: Create health statuses like "At-risk," "Neutral," and "Healthy," with scores ranging from 0 to 100.

2. Choose which companies get scored: Use lists or company properties to determine which accounts receive a health score.

3. Configure your scoring criteria: This is where the magic happens. You can create both event groups (based on activities) and property groups (based on data points) that contribute to the overall score.

4. Set up your calculation method: Choose how different contact activities and properties roll up into the company score—whether it's the minimum, maximum, sum, or average.

5. Preview and launch: Test your score on a few companies before making it live, then watch as every eligible company gets scored based on your existing data.

Once active, the health score appears as two properties on the company record: a raw number (0-100) and a health status (like "at-risk" or "healthy"). You can pin these to the company record, add them to the index page, and view them directly in the customer success workspace.

According to the HubSpot knowledge base, "If you have a Service Hub Professional subscription, you can create one health score. Users with a Service Hub Enterprise subscription can create up to 10 unique health scores." This flexibility allows enterprise users to create different scoring models for various customer segments or business units.

Pro Tips for Health Score Success

Having helped numerous clients implement customer health scores at Neighbourhood Co (Australia's #1 rated HubSpot Diamond Partner), we've learned a few things about what makes them effective:

1. Keep it simple: The more complex your health score, the harder it is to explain and act upon. Start with a few key indicators and refine over time.

2. Be specific about what "healthy" means: Different businesses have different definitions of customer health. A SaaS company might prioritize product usage, while a service business might focus on engagement metrics.

3. Include both leading and lagging indicators: Lagging indicators (like renewal history) tell you what happened, while leading indicators (like declining usage) help predict what will happen.

4. Don't set it and forget it: Your health score should evolve as your business and customer base grow. Review and adjust your criteria regularly.

5. Use decay for time-sensitive metrics: The Health Score Builder allows you to "decay" certain metrics over time, ensuring that recent activities carry more weight than ancient history.

Real-World Applications

The beauty of the Health Score Builder is its versatility. Here are just a few ways companies are putting it to work:

• SaaS businesses are combining product usage data with support ticket volume to identify customers at risk of churning
• Professional services firms are tracking engagement metrics and project milestones to spot relationship issues early
• E-commerce companies are using purchase frequency and support interactions to identify loyal customers for VIP programs
• B2B organizations are monitoring multiple contacts within each account to ensure healthy relationships across departments

The Bottom Line

HubSpot's Health Score Builder transforms the chaotic art of customer health monitoring into a streamlined science. It takes all that messy data, makes it comprehensible, and gives you the power to predict issues, seize opportunities, and ultimately keep your customers happier.

In a business landscape where customer retention is often more valuable than acquisition, having this kind of insight isn't just nice to have—it's a competitive advantage. So what are you waiting for? Your crystal ball awaits.

Need help implementing HubSpot's Health Score Builder for your business? Chat with us today!