In this episode of Some Goodness, host Richard Ellis interviews Dr. Jim Karrh, a renowned professor, author, and consultant specializing in marketing and customer communication. They discuss the critical importance of understanding and improving customer health as businesses face significant attrition challenges. The conversation explores how traditional methods like Net Promoter Score (NPS) are becoming outdated, and introduces a more holistic, data-driven approach to evaluating customer health. Jim highlights a three-dimensional framework comprising customer relationship quality, product usage, and value realization, offering practical guidance on how to implement these metrics. The episode also delves into the role of different business teams in influencing customer health and shares best practices for conducting effective Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs).

Here is a link to the resesarch Jim mentions: https://hbr.org/2024/07/toward-healthier-b2b-relationships

Keywords
customer health, customer relationship quality, product usage, value realization, retention, churn prediction, net promoter score, NPS, Harvard Business Review, Toward Healthier B2B Relationships, customer success, account expansion, data-driven strategies, subjective vs. objective data, QBR, quarterly business review, strategic collaboration, value creation, BigCommerce, Revenue Innovations, customer success team, sales team alignment, customer retention, predictive metrics, customer experience, multi-dimensional framework, account team, product team, financial team, customer insights, client engagement

Sound Bites 

•  "Sometimes it's hard to get customers to tell us what's going on."
•  "We really need to engage a lot of different teams inside the company to get a good gauge of customer health."
•  "Map out contributions by function to customer health. Just start there."
•  "Treat QBR as a precious opportunity."
•  "No one expects your stuff to work perfectly all the time."
•  "Be as objective as you can in terms of the inputs to gauge customer health and rely on your best people across teams to say, what are the implications for us?"
•  "Start somewhere. You probably have a lot of good inputs that can get you going."