Client Health Score

client-health-score

The problem this solves: the first sign most agencies get that a client is unhappy is the cancellation email. By then it's over — the decision was made weeks or months earlier, quietly, in a client who stopped replying fast, stopped opening reports, or started asking pointed questions about value. Those signals were sitting in your inbox, your ClickUp thread, your report open-rates the whole time. This skill turns them into one internal number per client, tracked over time, so a cooling relationship shows up as a trend while there's still a renewal conversation left to have — not as a surprise.

A churn risk you catch in month 2 of a slide is a save-able conversation. The same risk caught the week of the renewal invoice is a lost account you're now writing a post-mortem about. This is the difference between those two outcomes.

This is an internal tool — the score itself is never client-facing (see client-dashboard for what a client is allowed to see).

Say this to your agent

"Set up a health score for each client. Pull from: response time to our messages, whether they open/engage with our weekly reports, on-time payment, how many deliverables we shipped vs. planned this month, and any explicit sentiment (complaints, praise, 'checking in' calls they initiate). Score each client weekly, show me the trend, and flag anyone trending down two weeks in a row — even if the current score still looks fine. Never show this score to the client — it's for us."

The signals that actually predict churn (and the ones that don't)

Vanity numbers to leave out: contract length remaining, total lifetime spend, or "how much we like them" — none of those predict whether they are about to leave.

The pattern

1. Pick the signals once, per client type (retainer vs. project-based clients often need slightly different weights — a project client without a live report to open isn't automatically "disengaged").
2. Score weekly, on a simple scale (e.g., 1–5 or green/yellow/red) — resist building an elaborate weighted formula before you have a few months of real trend data to tune it against.
3. Track the trend, not just the snapshot. A client sitting at "yellow" for six straight weeks is a different problem than one that dropped from green to yellow this week — the second is more urgent even though the raw number looks the same or better.
4. Flag two-consecutive-weeks-down before the score itself looks bad. The whole point is catching the slide early — waiting until the score is already red defeats the purpose.
5. Route flags to a human conversation, never an automated save-attempt email. The score's job is to tell you who to check in on personally — it should never trigger an autopilot "we miss you" sequence to a paying client.

Weekly health read format

## Client Health — Week of <date>

| Client | Score | Trend | Flag |
|---|---|---|---|
| Acme Co | 4/5 | steady | — |
| Bolt Industries | 3/5 | down 2wk | Reply time up from 4hr to 2 days; report opens dropped to 0 last 2 weeks |
| Crest Partners | 2/5 | down 3wk | Missed 2 of 4 planned deliverables; invoice 12 days late |

Recommend a personal check-in this week: Bolt Industries, Crest Partners

What goes into the score vs. what stays out

What a good result looks like

• A cooling client shows up as a two-week downward trend, with a concrete reason, before renewal season — giving you weeks to have the save conversation instead of reading a cancellation notice.
• The score is boring to check every week precisely because most weeks nothing's wrong — which is exactly why the weeks something IS wrong stand out.
• Nobody outside your team ever sees this score — it's a compass for where you personally spend attention, not a client-facing artifact.
• Renewal conversations stop being a surprise either direction — you already know, weeks out, who's solid and who needs a real conversation.

The rules it runs under

1. Internal-only, always. This score never appears on a client dashboard, in a client email, or in anything the client can see — pairs with, but is the mirror image of, client-dashboard's "never leak internal machinery to the client" rule.
2. Evidence-based, not vibes-based. Every score change traces to an observable signal, not a hunch — if there's no evidence, the score doesn't move.
3. Flag early, don't wait for red. A two-week downward trend is worth a look even while the absolute score still reads "fine."
4. A flag routes to a human conversation, never an automated retention sequence — the fix for a cooling client relationship is a person reaching out, not a drip campaign.
5. Composes with agency-scorecard (aggregate "clients below threshold" can be one Scorecard row) and feeds the client-safe summary in client-dashboard — but the two are never the same document.