The Customer Success Pro Podcast Rethinking Health Scores in Customer Success with Sean Reid
Nov 5, 2025
Sean Reid, an award-winning customer success leader with experience at HubSpot and Personio, dives into the intricacies of health scores. He reveals how green scores can hide churn risks and emphasizes the importance of multithreading to engage key stakeholders. Sean introduces the concept of a Renewal Probability Score, balancing human sentiment with product signals for better forecasting. He also discusses transforming quarterly business reviews into compelling value stories and argues for viewing NPS as a long-term trend rather than a single data point.
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Green Account That Churned Overnight
- Sean discovered a large ‘green’ HubSpot customer churned unexpectedly and ran a post-mortem to find missed signals.
- He traced the failure to absent influencers and lack of multi-threaded engagement inside the account.
Health Scores Are Mostly Retrospective
- Health scores often reflect past events and are retroactive rather than predictive.
- Sean realized systems miss human sentiment signals that only CSMs can surface.
Rename Health Score To Renewal Probability
- Kill the term “health score” and rename it to Renewal Probability Score for clarity and cross-functional alignment.
- Use a name that tells GTM and product exactly what the metric predicts: renewal likelihood.