What is a Client Health Score?

Why Agencies Use Health Scores

Client churn at agencies rarely announces itself. A client does not call to say 'we're drifting away.' What happens instead: calls become less frequent, revision requests slow down, the PM stops logging contact because there is nothing to log. Three months later the client sends a short email.

A health score catches this pattern at the second month, not the third. When contact drops below 30 days and no new work is active, the score falls below 50 and the client enters 'At Risk.' That flag appears on a dashboard. The PM makes a call.

Healthy accounts also benefit from scoring. A score above 80 with expanding task count is a signal to propose new scope. Without the score, that expansion opportunity goes unnoticed until the client brings it up themselves.

• Replaces gut-feel account tracking with a measurable signal
• Surfaces at-risk clients before they reach the decision to leave
• Identifies accounts where upsell is timely based on activity data
• Gives new team members instant context without a briefing from the outgoing PM

How to Calculate a Client Health Score

The formula combines four categories of signals: activity, contact recency, project status, and follow-up scheduling. Start with a base of 50, then add or subtract based on each factor.

Activity signals: active tasks in progress (+25), no active tasks (-15), active projects (+10).

Contact recency: contacted within 14 days (+15), within 30 days (+5), 31 to 60 days ago (-10), more than 60 days ago (-25), never contacted (-10).

Follow-up: follow-up date set (+5).

Clamp the result to 0-100. A client with active work and a call three days ago scores around 90. A client with no tasks and last contact 70 days ago scores around 10.

This formula is a starting point. Mature implementations add invoice status as a negative signal. A client with two overdue invoices should score lower than their task count alone would suggest.

The 3 Health Buckets: Healthy, At Risk, Dormant

Three buckets convert the raw score into actionable categories.

Healthy: score 50 or above with some recent activity. Standard account management applies. Schedule a monthly check-in, look for expansion opportunities.

At Risk: score below 50. Something has slipped, whether contact frequency, active work, or both. The right response is an unscheduled call, not an email. Find out what changed.

Dormant: no active tasks AND either no contact history or last contact more than 60 days ago. Dormant is not simply a very low score. It identifies clients who may have already made a decision to leave, they just have not said so yet. The Dormant bucket requires a personal outreach, not a drip email.

• Healthy (50+): active work, recent contact, regular follow-up
• At Risk (below 50): something has slipped, needs unscheduled attention
• Dormant: no active work plus stale or missing contact history

Client Health Score vs NPS

NPS (Net Promoter Score) asks clients how likely they are to recommend you. It is a survey-based metric, retrospective by nature, and typically run quarterly or annually. A client can give you a score of 9 in February and be considering cancellation by April without any NPS data changing.

A health score is operational, not survey-based. It reads from your CRM data in real time. No client action required. No survey response lag. The score reflects what is actually happening now: task activity, communication frequency, billing status.

The two metrics serve different purposes. NPS measures sentiment at a point in time. Health score measures engagement continuously. Agencies need both, but health score is more actionable for day-to-day account management.

Automating Client Health Scores

A health score that requires manual entry defeats its own purpose. If a PM must update a field to trigger recalculation, the field gets updated inconsistently, and the score becomes stale within days.

Automatic calculation reads directly from existing CRM data: task records, contact log timestamps, project records, and follow-up dates. No new data entry. No scheduled jobs. The score recalculates every time the data it depends on changes.

In Melororium, the health score runs client-side on every render. Log a contact call, and the score updates the moment you click save. Create a task for a dormant client, and they move from Dormant to At Risk in the same view reload. The score reflects the current state, not yesterday's snapshot.

• Calculate from existing CRM data, no new inputs required
• Recalculate in real time when relevant data changes
• Surface the score and its contributing reasons, not just the number
• Show Dormant clients separately from At Risk, not just sorted by score

Client Health Score in Melororium

The Health section in Melororium's Clients module shows three stat cards at the top: Healthy, At Risk, and Dormant counts. Below them, two tables list At Risk clients and Dormant clients in priority order.

Each row shows the client name, the score, the responsible team member, and a 'Why' column with the specific factors pulling the score down: 'No active work, 47d since contact' or 'Follow-up overdue.' The PM reading this row knows exactly what to do next.

The score recalculates on every page render from live Zustand store data. No stale overnight batch. No manual refresh. Starter plan ($29/mo, 4 users), Agency plan ($59/mo, 10 users), Studio plan ($119/mo, 25 users). All plans include the CRM and health scoring.