Speed was the easy one. This week is the claim that gets budget approved and almost never gets tested: that partners do not only bring you customers, they make those customers succeed.
I wanted a score that could prove that claim wrong. A metric that can only flatter you is decoration.
What CSI measures
CSI is a weighted average across five components of a customer’s health, each scored 0 to 10.
Product adoption. Is the customer actually using what they bought?
Engagement quality. Are the delivery engagements around this customer healthy, moving and completing?
Advocacy. Has the customer become a reference, a case study, a referrer? It is the hardest component to fake, because nobody advocates for a product that is failing them.
Business outcomes. The commercial trail: renewals, expansion, realised value.
Customer sentiment. What the customer says when you ask, folded in from survey responses and support experience.
The weights are yours to set. A product-led company loads adoption. A services-heavy one loads engagement quality. Our defaults are sensible, and they are defaults. Success is defined by you in configuration, not hardcoded by us. That is a recurring theme in this series: the platform computes, you define what counts.
The question I would ask any vendor in this category, us included
What does your score do when a component has no data?
Say you run no surveys, so there is no sentiment signal at all. Most scoring systems substitute a neutral value, a 5 out of 10, and roll it in. The result looks complete and is partly fabricated. The score in your quarterly review now contains a digit nobody measured.
CSI does not do that. A component with no data is excluded, and the weights renormalise over what is actually present. Run no surveys and your CSI is a real average of the four components you do measure, rather than four real numbers and one invented one.
There is also a floor. If too little of the weighted picture is present, the score is withheld entirely. Not zeroed, not defaulted, withheld, and it arrives with a list of exactly which inputs are missing. A blank that tells you why it is blank is more useful than a number that cannot tell you anything.
This is the design decision I would defend hardest. If a metric is going to sit in a QBR and move budget between partners, every digit in it has to trace back to something that happened.
Where partners come into it
CSI scores a customer. Its purpose is a partner question: which partners are attached to customers that succeed?
Line your partners up against the CSI of the customers they touch and the four depths become visible in your own data. A transactional partner appears at acquisition and disappears, so the health of that customer is whatever your own team makes of it. An implementation partner lifts early adoption and then hands over. A success-level partner leaves fingerprints across adoption, engagement, outcomes and eventually advocacy. Seeing that difference per partner, in data rather than asserted on a slide, is what lets you invest in depth instead of counting logos.
It is also what keeps last week’s metric honest. A high CDE with a low CSI means your ecosystem finds deals quickly and hands over customers who then struggle. You want both numbers side by side before you call any partnership strategic.
Reading your number
Score withheld? Read the list of missing inputs as a to-do list. The first gap is usually sentiment, and a simple recurring survey closes it inside a quarter.
High CDE, flat CSI? Stop widening the funnel and look hard at onboarding. The partners you need to recruit next do implementation and success work. More referrers will not help.
CSI rising wherever one specific partner is involved? That partner is doing lifecycle work nobody asked them for. Name it, measure it, build the relationship deeper. Most ecosystems never have that conversation, because nobody ever had the number in front of them.
Where the numbers come from
Same answer as last week. Adoption, outcomes and sentiment come out of systems you already run: your CRM, your support desk, your survey tool. They import into the workspace, or arrive by export if you would rather start there. The only input CSI may ask you to create is the survey itself, and only if you do not run one today.
Run the five-customer audit
As with CDE, you can approximate this in a spreadsheet: five columns, your own weights, and the discipline to leave a cell blank instead of guessing at it. The template is free and ungated:
If you would rather have it computed continuously, per customer and per partner, with the missing-input list telling you what to instrument next, that is what Entwine does. The free workspace monitors five relationships and takes no card:
Run it by hand and I would like to hear what pattern you find. Reply to this email and it comes straight to me.
This is part 2 of a series on the three ecosystem metrics. Part 1 covered CDE, Customer Discovery Efficiency. Next: ECS, the Ecosystem Completeness Score, and the uncomfortable question of how much of what your customers need your ecosystem cannot yet meet.
This is part 2 of a series on the three ecosystem metrics. Part 1 covered CDE, Customer Discovery Efficiency. Next: ECS, the Ecosystem Completeness Score, and the uncomfortable question of how much of your customers’ needs your ecosystem cannot yet meet.