Most customer success teams track new accounts with one of two things: a health score, or a list of onboarding milestones. They answer different questions, and mixing them up is how a stuck account goes unnoticed for three weeks.
What a health score is good at
A health score rolls many signals into one number: logins, seats used, support tickets, survey answers. It is useful when you have hundreds of mature accounts and need a rough sort of which ones to look at first. It is a summary, and like any summary it hides the detail.
For a new account that detail is the whole story. A score of 62 does not tell you whether the account never connected its data or connected it and then stopped. Those are different calls with different people.
What a milestone is good at
A milestone is one step a new account has to finish: team invited, data source connected, first report shared. Each has a place you can see it happen and a time limit. When the limit passes, the account is on hold at that step.
That gives you something a score cannot: the next action. If an account is on hold at “data source connected” for six days, the call is about the data connection, and it goes to whoever set up the integration.
Use both, at different times
Milestones fit the first weeks, while an account is still being set up and every step is either done or not. Once onboarding is complete, a health score is a reasonable way to watch a large book of live accounts.
The mistake is using the score from day one. New accounts score low because they are new, so the score flags all of them, and a list where everything is flagged gets ignored.
A quick test
Pick one account that churned in its first ninety days. Could your current dashboard have told you, on a specific day, which step it was stuck on? If the answer is no, start with milestones. The six-step guide walks through writing them, and there is a free printable template if you want to start on paper.