Customer Health Review Process Template
Two documents and three sheets that cross contact load against usage trend so a quiet, declining account is not overlooked.
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Castellan Software · 60-account book, one quarter
A reactive review touches 23 of 60 accounts. Zero of the 8 quiet decliners.
| Segment | Accounts | % of book | Churned or downgraded next quarter |
|---|---|---|---|
| High contact, usage stable or improving | 14 | 23.3% | 14.3% |
| High contact, usage declining | 9 | 15.0% | 33.3% |
| Low contact, usage stable or improving | 29 | 48.3% | 6.9% |
| Low contact, usage declining | 8 | 13.3% | 62.5% |
The bottom row is 13.3% of the book and 41.7% of every churn or downgrade in it. A review that only checks accounts which filed a ticket or made a call never reaches a single one of them, because none of the eight generated either.
Every resource on page one for this query is a scorecard review. A documented SOP has the reviewer confirm the score's inputs are fresh, check the weights against an approved model, then classify flagged accounts by severity before the meeting. A quarterly-review skill format adds a four-component score with its own yellow-cap rule. Both assume the score itself is the hard part. Neither asks which accounts get reviewed at all, and a CSM working from a flagged list reviews the accounts that made themselves visible this week, not the ones actually declining.
Tversky and Kahneman's research on the availability heuristic found that people judge frequency by how easily instances come to mind, not by the actual rate of occurrence. A support ticket is memorable by construction, filed on purpose so someone will read it. An account whose usage has been sliding for two months with nobody complaining generates nothing to recall, so a review built on recall cannot reach it. Crossing contact load against usage trend, not just totaling a score, is what makes that account visible on purpose instead of invisible by default.
For one fictional vendor, Castellan Software, and a sixty-account book reviewed in Q2: 23 accounts, 38.3 percent, generated a ticket or a call this quarter, and a reactive review touches exactly those. Eight more, 13.3 percent, had usage quietly declining with no contact at all. One quarter later those eight had churned or downgraded at 62.5 percent against 14.3 percent for the loud-but-stable accounts, 41.7 percent of every bad outcome in the book from 13.3 percent of it. An account here with high contact and declining usage routes straight to the save play tracker instead.
What's in the pack
Segment by Attention Needed, Not by Who Has Been Getting in Touch
The method itself: cross contact load against usage trend into four groups, so a quiet, declining account is visible on purpose instead of staying invisible until it is gone.
Portfolio View sheet
Every account in the book with its contact load and usage trend for the same period, plus an existing health score and contract value if you already track one.
Account Segmentation sheet
Every account assigned to one of four segments with the specific metric behind the call, not a category label alone, and the contact-load split point stated plainly.
Review Cadence doc
How often each segment gets checked and by whom, with the quiet decliners on a fixed schedule regardless of anything else competing for attention that cycle.
Intervention Playbook doc
What to actually say to an account that has not complained about anything, opening with the specific number that moved rather than a generic check-in.
Intervention Log sheet
The dated record of outreach actually run this cycle and what it found, so next quarter's review starts from what happened, not from a blank sheet.
How it works
- 1
Send usage, support, billing and engagement data
For the whole book over one trailing period, plus a health score if you already compute one; raw usage trend and ticket counts work fine without it.
- 2
River builds the Portfolio View and sets the split
Every account's contact load and usage trend side by side, with the threshold that divides high from low contact stated on the sheet itself.
- 3
The book splits into four segments
Crossing contact load against usage trend, with a specific one-line reason on every row instead of a category description repeated down the column.
- 4
Get the cadence and the plays
One section per segment in both documents, segment four leading with the number that moved, since there is no ticket to reference instead.
Frequently asked questions
Is this template free?
Yes. Two Word documents and three CSV sheets, downloaded as a zip, no signup. River is the optional half: it reads your usage, support and billing exports, builds the Portfolio View, then crosses contact load against usage trend to segment the book.
We already have a customer health score dashboard. Why add this?
A health score's weights are a separate, testable question that belongs to CRM data governance. This pack takes whatever score or raw signals you already have and decides which accounts get proactive attention this cycle, crossing contact load against usage trend rather than reading one blended number.
What is the actual line between high and low contact?
Either the book's own median contact count for the period, or a fixed number if the team already has one, stated directly on the Account Segmentation sheet. A threshold left implicit in a conversation does not survive the next person who opens the sheet.
Isn't the high-contact, declining-usage account obviously the most urgent one?
It is legitimately at risk, and it is also the segment that is nearly impossible to miss, because the tickets are already there. This space confirms it has an open save and moves on. The segment that actually needs a scheduled, deliberate check is the quiet one nothing else would surface.
How is this different from a quarterly business review?
A QBR is the meeting format for one account already selected. This pack is the portfolio-wide decision about which accounts deserve that kind of attention this cycle, run before the individual review, not instead of it. Between reviews, the customer-facing usage report is the monthly artifact that keeps one of those accounts' own champions current on adoption by team.
Does this replace an individual renewal risk brief?
No. Once this pack flags an account, the renewal risk brief is the one-account, one-renewal deep dive. This pack is what decides who gets that attention in the first place, across the whole book at once.
What happens to a quiet decliner that does not recover despite outreach?
Then it may still churn, and understanding exactly when that became likely is a different, later question. The churn post mortem finds the point the account was actually lost and whether the signal existed in data already on hand.
Review the book by attention needed, not by who called this week
Send usage, support, billing and engagement data for the whole book. Get a Portfolio View, four segments, and a playbook that opens with the number instead of a guess.
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