At the core of any customer success role is the need to ensure customers who have trusted a solution reach their desired goals or outcomes. However, customer success leaders more often find themselves handling service challenges and putting out fires rather than being able to proactively add value.

We believe that customer success teams and leaders will be more successful only if they can get alerted to most issues through early-warning. This way they have time to act before things go south. These alerts need to be automated (not sent from scratch), well-timed (on appropriate frequencies), comprehensive (on all things that need to be monitored), and intelligent (including lessons from industry-wide best practices).

By implementing automated alerts and triggers, CSMs can stay notified in real-time, be able to act on events and data points before it is too late, as well as see a massive upswing in customer satisfaction and renewals. Here are our picks for the top alerts customer success managers or leaders might use to guide teams and track issues.

Health Score

This monitors when the health score dips or trends downward.

A customer health score is a measure of the current health of the account. Most health scores are measured in Red, Amber, and Green, but there might be a quantitative measure as well. Either way, if an account’s health score decreases for a period, it should be a cause for concern. Such negative trends should be captured and sent to the concerned customer success manager or leader. When the customer success team gets this alert, they will know whether it’s an issue that can impact churn or something that they can put off for later.

Renewal

This alert shows when the customer account is up for renewal.

A customer success leader or customer success manager should also get alerted for any upcoming renewals on the accounts they manage—30, 60, or 90 days in advance—so that they have ample time to plan for it and act (perhaps kickstarting their Renewal Playbook). This would take away the mad scramble that kicks off whenever CSMs discover at the last moment that an account is up for renewal in a couple of weeks. It also improves the customer experience teams who don’t have to respond to renewal discussions on licenses and pricing in a hurry.

Touchpoints

Touchpoints tell you whether you’re engaging your customer sufficiently.

Touchpoints management is a very important aspect of managing customer experience, for both high touch and tech touch accounts. Again, customer success teams should be notified of any negative touchpoint trends. That way CSMs get to know if they have inadvertently been ignoring some accounts, and customer success leaders can ensure that the team is staying in touch with the customer as often as they have agreed upon in the Account plan.

Champion

This tells you if you lose your Champion in the account.

This one should be obvious. Should you lose the Champion (your key contact and supporter in the account), CSMs should immediately be notified about this change. Enough studies have shown the strong correlation between losing a Champion and Churn, and CSMs should be warned about the change as early as possible to ensure that they have the time to establish strong relationships with other client stakeholders.

MRR

For any dip in the MRR

While overall MRR might be trending upwards, sometimes it is tough for CSMs to notice (especially when they are handling a lot of accounts) that some of the accounts have started showing dips (especially for businesses that have monthly billing from users that constantly change). CSMs and their leaders have a right to expect the system to alert them about these dips so that, at worst, they are aware and, at best, they are able to do something to cause a change.

Churn

This tells you if customer churn exceeds the tolerance.

Most organizations set a tolerance (max allowed limit) on churn for the year and then track this metric across quarters. It is very important for Customer Success Managers to get alerted on Churn numbers constantly (at least once a month) so that they know where they stand on their portfolio and then can plan on how and what to change (if necessary). This is even more important for Customer Success Leaders to know how churn numbers spread across different portfolios and across  CSM teams. But, you already know it’s very important to have a good grip on Performance Management.

Feature Usage

This metric tells you when customers dip in engaging with your product.

This one is relevant only for product companies. CSMs of such businesses should get alerted if there is a dip in product usage since it is a clear sign of the account disengaging with the product (a known precursor to churn). This alert becomes even more meaningful if it can tell the CSM the specific feature that saw the dip, and this can then also be shared with Product Management and Business teams as inputs for future decisions on feature decisions.

Tasks

To track/monitor tasks

Last, but not least, the CSM should be helped with auto-tracking of tasks, especially as they approach the due date and especially if they become overdue. The Customer Success Leader should also be able to get alerts on CSMs who are constantly missing their task timelines, a sure indication of sub-par performance, or an overloaded CSM.

Final Thoughts

Choosing a Customer Success platform that is intelligent enough to proactively automate alerts is extremely important for building and growing successful CS teams. The future of Customer Success is about being intelligent, predictive, and, when appropriate, prescriptive.

With SmartKarrot, CS teams can amplify their performance with automated, pre-configured, intelligent alerts. Our platform creates 25+ auto-configured alerts to help scale CS operations the moment an account goes live with more getting added every month.

To get the top automated CS alerts system and stay ahead with your customer success efforts, get in touch with us. Click here for a free demo. Also, feel free to download a copy of top customer success alerts.

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