A customer health dashboard has to answer three questions in under thirty seconds: which accounts need me today, which are trending the wrong way, and where's the upside I'm missing. Longer than that and executives stop opening it. The scoring programme quietly dies about a month later.
This is the layout we default to. It is intentionally boring. A dashboard that needs a tour has already failed.
Zone 1 — The watchlist (top left)
A ranked list of accounts scoring below 55 (or whatever your "At Risk" band is), sorted by ARR at risk. Three columns: account name, health score with a small sparkline, and the dominant reason the score is where it is — "champion left in June," "two P1 escalations open," "no CFO relationship in 90 days." No colours doing the work of words.
Zone 2 — Movers (top right)
Accounts whose health score has moved most in the last 30 days, in both directions. Down movers surface accounts you're missing. Up movers surface expansion candidates and reference stories. Both are equally valuable and almost never displayed together.
Zone 3 — Portfolio distribution (middle)
A single stacked bar or histogram showing how ARR is distributed across Healthy / Watchlist / At Risk. Trend it monthly. The absolute count matters less than the direction of the line. If Watchlist ARR is growing quarter over quarter, that's the conversation for the exec meeting.
Zone 4 — Attention gaps (bottom)
The hidden risk, and honestly the zone that earns its keep. A table of accounts scoring above 65 but where no partner on your side has communicated with anyone senior in the last 30 days. These are the accounts everyone thinks are fine and no-one is actually running. In our own portfolio review the biggest surprises always show up here.
What to leave off
- Gauges. A speedometer for "average health" tells no-one what to do today.
- NPS on its own. Aggregated NPS is a vanity metric. Per-account CSAT is fine, and belongs inside the row — not on top of the dashboard.
- Product usage graphs. Valuable, but they belong on the account page, not the portfolio view. Mixing altitudes confuses the audience.
- Twelve KPI tiles across the top. Every one of them is somebody's favourite. Together they mean nothing.
How executives should use it
Weekly, ten minutes. Open Zone 1, pick the top three, get an update from the account owner by end of day. Monthly, thirty minutes. Look at Zone 3 trend and Zone 4 — that's where the strategic conversation is, not in the individual account weeds.
Four zones, no drill-throughs on the main view, no toggles. That's the whole dashboard. The magic — such as it is — is that partners actually open it, and act on it, because there's nothing to interpret.