Your multi-year contract is up for renewal, and you believe your competitors would love to be your position. Your team assures you the customer loves your solution, and your NPS and CSAT are glowing and your CES trends low—all painting a picture of success.
You’re relaxed as you login to the call and turn on your camera.
But the award is announced…and it’s not you.
You begin to tense up and a range of emotions hit you as the meeting wraps up.
What went wrong?
You have a relationship blind spot. It’s time to track your Customer Relationship Score (CRS).
Leaders rely on customer engagement metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES) to gauge relationship health, but these tools often fall short.
Designed for transactional moments, like a satisfaction survey after an engagement, these tools leave a critical gap for B2B and B2G organizations. Studies now show customer satisfaction data does not predict loyalty or accurately describe the nature of a relationship, which is why many are starting to abandon these measurements altogether.
Leaders have recognized these measurements fail to capture the trust, alignment, and emotional connection in complex partnerships, leaving them with an incomplete picture and a lack of actionable insights.
Even when combined into customer health scores, they provide a fragmented view, missing the depth needed for complex sales cycles with high-stakes decisions.
That’s where Customer Relationship Score (CRS) comes in.
Losing any contract can be incredibly frustrating, especially if you were convinced you would win. And unfortunately, it can have devastating consequences.
When this happens, leaders immediately wonder:
“How could my team let a competitor steal it right from under our noses, and why are our customer metrics not lining up with our reality?! “
The answer is simple: your team overestimated their relationships and your engagement metrics have weak correlations to key outcomes.
In fact, customer relationships are still one of the biggest blindspots for most B2B leaders.
Most teams have no idea how customers actually see them.
We receive calls daily from frustrated leaders who were led to believe they were in great standing with key customers and stakeholders before a significant loss.Â
Reality rarely matches this self-assessment, as we all naturally overestimate our social abilities and most teams don’t know what makes a customer relationship “great” or what drives loyalty.
If you’re not tracking any KPI associated with customer relationship quality, there is no way for you to validate their claims or understand what’s at risk.
This is the perfect storm clearing a path for your competitors.
We recently met with a CRO who discovered he recently lost a significant contract because the competitor’s team had dug deeper, catching shifts in needs and priorities his program manager, engineer, and even sales team had missed.
While this CRO’s team approached their customer engagements like a checklist, his competitors were hard at work gathering the customer’s real requirements and motives. This mistake cost his organization over $72M in their forecast.
If his team had been measuring and monitoring their customer relationship quality with Customer Relationship Scores (CRS), he would have known this account was at risk.
THIS DISCONNECT IS VERY COSTLY
Many companies pour significant resources into building close relationships with profitable customers, yet their efforts frequently fall short.
The root cause? A lack of clear objectives and measurable progress indicators.
In fact, we’ve found most organizations struggle to define what a strong customer relationship looks like, how to cultivate it, or even how to quantify its impact.
This knowledge gap undermines the effectiveness of CRM and CX initiatives, leading to disappointing returns on investment.
To bridge this divide, a strategic, integrated approach to customer relationship management is essential, with Customer Relationship Score as the guiding light.
At its core, the Customer Relationship Score (CRS) reflects the strength of the partnership: how much customers see your team as a vital ally focused on their success, and not just another vendor.
❌ It doesn’t measure how often your team shares in casual conversations.
✅ It’s a deeper, more strategic measure of how much the customer values your partnership.
High CRS means your employees—especially those with direct customer access, like sales, business developers and delivery teams—aren’t guessing about needs or improvising solutions.
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Instead, they’re armed with real insight into their customers, value and turning relationships into a competitive edge. It’s about alignment, not just chit-chat.
Customer Relationship Score (CRS)
A measurement of trust, emotional connection, and strategic alignment between a company and its customers.Â
Unlike traditional metrics that focus on transactional satisfaction, CRS provides a deeper view of relationship quality and practical steps to take to improve factors driving loyalty, retention, and long-term growth.
By integrating CRS into your workflows, you can align teams, enhance customer loyalty, and fuel sustainable growth.
Innovative firms use Customer Relationship Scores to:Â
- Assess Relationship Health Quickly
- Segment Accounts by Relationship Strength
- Prioritize Renewal Strategies
- Trigger Proactive Engagement:
- Identify Growth Opportunities
- Monitor Stakeholder Alignment
- Enhance Customer Experience Consistency
- Foster a Customer-Centric Culture
CRS is calculated using the Hi-Q Group CRS Assessment answered by customer-facing roles. This score can be used independently or blended in custom CRS composite scores tailored to an organization’s specific metrics and priorities.Â
CRS can be used to strengthen a single customer relationship or assess the health of multiple accounts to identify risks and growth opportunities across your portfolio. In B2B and B2G companies, where one relationship doesn’t determine success, CRS provides the insights to manage both the details and the big picture.
This is why the best-performing companies focus on CRS as a leading indicator driving CRM and CX strategies—and it works.Â
The HI-Q Group CRS Assessment stands out in 3 ways:
1. OBJECTIVE, BEHAVIOR-FOCUSED
The CRS Assessment includes questions like “How often do you discuss the customer’s strategic goals?” or “Do you have access to key decision-makers?”
These questions focus on observable behaviors (e.g., frequency of strategic discussions) and access (e.g., stakeholder engagement), rather than subjective assessments such as, “I think they really love us!”
This contrasts with traditional metrics, which often rely on customer-reported data, such as “How likely are you to recommend us?” (NPS) or “How satisfied are you?” (CSAT).
By grounding the assessment in employee actions and results, CRS ensures a clear, unbiased view of relationship health, forcing frontline teams to confront gaps they typically overlook.
2. EASE AND SPEED OF EXECUTION
Unlike many engagement metrics, which depend on time-consuming customer input strategies, the CRS Assessment’s limited question set is answered by customer-facing teams, minimizing survey fatigue and ensuring consistent and timely data.
Its flexibility supports monthly check-ins or quarterly reviews, offering deeper insights and clear, actionable steps to take to enhance retention and win rates.
3. TIMELY, ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS
The CRS Assessment’s design allows for ongoing or targeted application, enabling real-time insights into individual customer relationships or account-wide health.
For example, a low account CRS might reveal a lack of stakeholder access, prompting immediate actions such as scheduling a strategic meeting for increased penetration. Or an individual low CRS could signal to leadership a coaching opportunity for customer-facing roles on the account.Â
These insights into key customer relationships and accounts are critical to protect your business.
Businesses need to constantly evaluate how they do business with people. [This training] will create a team enabled to build deep embedded partnerships that provide the business long term, sustainable and desirable results across the organization.
CRS fosters team accountability, clarifying relationship strengths and prompting proactive action. Integrated into CRM dashboards, individual or account-wide scores provide a clear view of risks and opportunities across target accounts.
The following elements affect your team’s individual Customer Relationship Score:
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Customer Engagement Skills: The ability to connect meaningfully with customers.
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Frequency & Depth of Engagements: How often and how deeply employees engage with customers.
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Customer Understanding: Knowing what matters to the customer and aligning efforts to match.
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Customer Expectations Management: Setting and meeting realistic expectations.
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Customer Interaction Outcomes: The results of employee-customer exchanges.Â
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Level of Customer-Centricity: Putting the customer’s needs first.
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Organizational & Situational Awareness: Understanding the customer’s broader context.
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Collaboration & Adaptability: Working together on solutions and adapting to changing needs.
CRS uncovers critical blind spots by revealing the disconnect between employees’ perceived relationship-building practices and their actual effectiveness.
