Score every customer red, yellow or green each week and act on the color

1. The case behind it

The view here is that clients are clients: a way of keeping customers built in one kind of business carries over to another. In one example, it was run in one business that serves its customers through account reps.

That business had first written the method for its customers, and had stopped running it on its own. The person in charge of it had left, the person who came next was never trained on it, and it faded out. Anyone long enough in business knows the pattern: someone asks why the team stopped doing a thing, and the answer is that the one person who ran it moved on. On its chart, the business was losing clients: net retention sat under zero in most weeks, with only a few weeks above it. The team raised a plain question: why not run the business's own retention system on the business itself? Once it was back in place, the change in churn from the week it started was called dramatic. This page gives no figure for the size of that change.

The lesson drawn from it: sometimes you need reminding more than you need teaching. Working out what is true is the hard part of business, and what is true can still be simple. This system is simple on purpose.

2. Set the colors by what you will do about them

One color per response. Use one color for each distinct thing you will do, and no more. That is the reason red, yellow and green are preferred here over a numbered health score. Nothing is wrong with a health score as such, but a score still gets cut into ranges, say one action for anyone below 20 and another for anyone below 50. That leaves you with three or four buckets in the end, and the buckets are what drive what people do.

Define each color for your business. This is step one. The definitions below are one business's, and these applied to its own customers:

Color	What it meant there
Green	Getting leads, getting a return, and in contact with their account rep
Yellow	The return or the leads are short, yet the customer still talks to the rep and has signaled no intent to cancel: they have not said they are thinking of leaving, or unsure whether to stay
Red	An active cancellation; out of contact or not responding; or a skipped meeting in the regular cadence

Leads and return typically move together: a customer getting plenty of leads typically sees a good return, unless they are poor at selling, which could be why one shows up without the other. Either one falling short is enough for yellow. A yellow is someone still working through it: the system is being put in place, and they have not got there yet.

A missed meeting counts on its own. If a customer meets their rep every two weeks and skips one, that alone moves them straight to red.

3. Score every account, every week

• After every customer meeting, the rep goes straight to the CRM and marks the account red, yellow or green, with notes. This is the post-call summary.
• Every week, each rep looks over the whole list of accounts and scores every one.

Some of this takes elbow grease, and part of it is judgment. A customer who seems to be working through it, not there yet but not trying to cancel, is a yellow, and something needs doing. A red means high alert, a customer very likely to cancel.

If you want it less dependent on the rep. Software can sit in on calls, turn each one into text, read its tone and give it a score. That makes the rating more quantitative for anyone who wants it, without relying on each rep's sense of things. The view here is that some feel stays in it all the same.

4. Green: keep going

Carry on as you are.

5. Yellow: double down

1. Talk more often. If you meet the customer every other week, move to weekly, or to twice a week.
2. Pick one play. Go to your playbook, the fixes you have run again and again, and choose which one to run for this customer.
3. Drive it home. Walk them all the way to the finish and make sure they do it.

More contact, a clear plan, and pushing it through to execution: that is the yellow response.

Yellows are the opening. In the view here, the yellows are probably among the openings owners overlook most: customers who are not loving it, but are still there. They are the big chance to move people into green. Get them up to speed. The attendance pattern behind this, where a customer slips from three visits a week to two and then one before canceling, and the point at which to reach out, is in section 9 of SOP 73 — Feature-downsell customers before they cancel. The small slips are where customers fall away, and the aim is to step in just before that happens.

6. Red: escalate, then hand the account back to the rep

A red is out of contact, not responding, or actively canceling. The response is to escalate.

1. Someone more senior steps in. A customer is more likely to answer a director or the head of the company than their account rep. That catches most customers' attention and makes them readier to join a call.
2. Hear them out, then set the plan. The senior person makes sure the customer feels heard, and gives them clear marching orders.
3. Build the rep back up. This part is vital. Undercut the rep and the relationship is ruined; the customer ends up dealing with the director or manager instead. That is the wrong outcome.

You do not need to say the rep's earlier work was wrong. If the new plan is different, present it as the plan, and hand the credit back. Something like: Here's the plan. Your rep is great and will walk you through it. We talked it over beforehand; this was actually their idea. All the authority moves back to the rep. The senior person is there as the bait that gets the customer on the call and makes them feel heard.

7. Put any concession in a signed short-term agreement

If you offer something to carry a customer through a rough stretch, ask them to sign a short-term agreement that covers it. In the example given, the offer was 50 percent off for two months to get a customer through a period of weak leads or return; that is an example, not a rule.

It sets out the stretch it covers and what the customer commits to doing in that time. Signing it makes the arrangement feel real to them and cements it: this new agreement, for this stretch, with these things they will do. Contract law is not covered on this page.

8. The routines that keep it running

Few tactics are needed to make this work operationally. These are the ones named:

1. The post-call summary. The color and notes go into the CRM after every meeting (section 3).
2. The end-of-week report. Each rep sends one to their director every week. If a rep's churn runs higher, for whatever reason, the director coaches that rep, works out what the problems are, and tries to fix them. Splitting churn by the assigned rep is in section 6 of SOP 158 — Diagnose churn by cohort.
3. A rapid-response channel. Set up one channel for any customer who shows an intent to cancel. A cancellation request goes straight into it, and the team escalates as fast as it can: the head of account reps would like to talk to you; are you free later today? The aim is to stop it early. Running the call itself is SOP 132 — Run the cancellation call.
4. Open every leadership standup with the cancellations. The leadership team meets daily, or Monday, Wednesday and Friday, on what it is driving toward. Each meeting begins by reading out the names of the customers who canceled, then a postmortem: why each one left, and what could have been done better. This one is called underrated.

Why the fourth works: when every meeting starts with what you got wrong, you tend to stop wanting to get it wrong. It forces you to face reality. The way to keep customers, plain as it sounds, is to stop them leaving: close each way out, one at a time, the way good product removes friction one hole at a time.

9. Keep it alive when people change

The case in section 1 shows where a system like this breaks: at a handover. One run by a single person disappears when that person leaves and the next one is never trained on it. The guard that follows: train whoever takes it over, so it outlasts the people running it.

10. For a member community: a health score from usage

A second view comes from a team that serves a member community and tracks every member, not a rep's list of accounts. It tracks every member against a set of signals and sorts each one as a champion, steady or at risk, which is the same green, yellow and red under other names. The signals it named:

Kind	Signals
Account	Tier; whether they are active; how they pay; the date they joined, and days since
Activity	Posts, comments and likes in total; courses started; how often they use the community's software tool

From these, it works out what an engaged champion looks like, what someone at risk looks like, and the activation steps each member needs to become a green. At that point it had run for about two months and was still collecting signals.

Two aims were named beside it: cut the time a customer takes to get value as far as you can, and raise the value they get per second. The aim is the least time spent for the most value. Value per second is set out in section 1 of SOP 131 — Run the keep-one and remove-one survey.

11. Where this sits

The retention habits, including reaching out twice a week, are SOP 133. Using a customer's drop in use as a warning is section 5 of SOP 140. What a support rep may decide alone is SOP 161. Red, yellow and green are also used on SOP 84 — Score and route inbound leads, where yellows are also the opening, and on SOP 153 — Fire without surprise and plan who covers the work, for where an employee stands.

12. What this page does not decide for you

• How accounts split across the colors. This page gives no figure for the split.
• What counts as high churn for one rep. Not established on this page.
• Which play a yellow gets. That comes from your own playbook. Not established on this page.
• Which usage signals weigh most in a health score. Not established on this page.

13. The checklist

Step	What to do
1	Define green, yellow and red for your business, one color per response
2	After every customer meeting, log the color and notes in the CRM
3	Each week, score every account on every rep's list
4	Green: keep going
5	Yellow: raise contact, pick one play, drive it to completion
6	Red: escalate to someone senior, hear the customer out, set the plan, credit the rep
7	Put any concession in a signed short-term agreement naming the period and the customer's actions
8	Reps send an end-of-week report; directors coach any rep with higher churn
9	Route every cancellation request to one channel and reach out the same day
10	Open each leadership standup with who canceled, why, and what could have saved them
11	When the person running the system changes, train the next one on it
12	For a member community, build a health score from usage signals and give each group its activation steps

14. What this page does not cover

Running the cancellation call is SOP 132's subject, and the terms around canceling are SOP 76 — Design cancellation terms and the waived-fee offer. Reading churn by when customers joined is SOP 158. Contract law is not covered on this page.