#15: Build An Alert System To Shift From Reactive To Proactive With Little To No Investment

In today’s issue, I want to show you how to build a simple and effective alert system that can help your CS Team work proactively. 

Being proactive means acting in anticipation of future problems and opportunities. It's the holy grail of Customer Success.

But despite all the talk about proactivity, my inbox is filled with questions from CSMs and CS leaders that are spinning their wheels and fighting fires, instead of focusing on the activities that will create tomorrow's success and help the team scale sustainably.

Let's put an end to that.

For this example, I’m going to build a simple alert system that will identify one early sign of churn for a Marketing Automation Platform.The entire process will be automated, and it only requires your CRM, basic access to your product data and one "if this, than that" logic. 

 📊 What signal should I use? 

People spend a lot of time discussing the right leading indicators. Sometimes to the detriment of getting started on simple things like low product usage. 

This is a no-brainer. If your customer is not using your solution, there is no way they can see results. That's the very first signal you should focus on if you want your team to be proactive.

As a Marketing Automation Platform, sending emails is a core product feature. Customers will not be able to generate leads without using a form of email marketing.

So we are going to track their email send volumes and base our risk and growth alerts on it. This is a view you could build using a Business Intelligence platform, but you could easily do this on Excel if you don't use one yet.

Top Tip: You can bring this view into your CRM. That way your CSM can see the customer's success over time in one single place.

🛠️ Building The Alert

There are a few ways you can think about alert triggers.

Mainly you will be looking at a drop against previous performance or comparing the customer's current performance to a benchmark. 

Benchmarking is the more complex choice as you will need to build a model where you take into account industry, company size, maturity etc. 

As we are only getting started, we will build an alert based on a drop in usage from last month. 

The logic for the alert will be:

• If 'Marketing Email Sends' in [current month] is lower than [last month], set CRM task [Alert: Your Customer Email Volume Dropped Last Month], to [Customer Success Manager]

Depending on your tech stack for your CRM and product usage data, you can build this logic codeless using an integration tool like Zapier or Workato. In some cases, you might need 30 minutes from a developer to make this work. 

🏃🏻‍♀️Drive Action From Alerts

The alert should clearly outline what's the next best step for the CSM to take.

You can create a template alert message and add personalization tokens to tailor the information to the specific customer scenario. And then link the playbook for CSM action to the message. 

This is how the alert task will look in the CRM (I am using HubSpot):

Top Tip: Set your CRM tasks to trigger email notifications. That way your CSMs get the alerts in the CRM and in their inbox. 

☁️ Final Thoughts

There are a million different ways to build alerts, with this just being one of them.

I could have chosen to build a completely different alert type, like a growth alert for customers hitting contact-tier limits. I could have made it more complex too. For example, I could have added:

• Benchmarking data
• Forks in the alert logic to tailor the alert message. Linking different playbooks depending on the level of underperformance.
• A Customer Success Platform 

But, none of that is necessary to get started. You now have a fully-functioning proactive alert system, using a basic IT infrastructure 

You can always add complexity in the future.

Go give it a try and let me know how it goes!