Best Practices Guide for Setting up Alerts

The core job of a Customer Success Manager (CSM) is to be proactive. To be more proactive in their job, CSMs need triggers that can act as leading indicators.

I’m sure you must have gone through the pain when you were unaware of certain activities of customers like usage drop and till the time you got to know about it, you have already lost the customer. 

In this situation, if you would have got the “Alert” for drop in Usage, you could have taken certain actions to prevent the customer from churning. 

There are “n” number of triggers that can act as Alerts. By definition, what is an Alert?

Alerts work as an early warning signal that notify you about the indicators of favorable/unfavorable customer behaviors and actions. While the majority of the times, we consider Alerts to be Risk signals, at CustomerSuccessBox, we believe there are possibly 4 types of alerts:

1. Onboarding Alerts

2. Renewal Alerts

3. Upsell Alerts

4. Risk Alerts.

In order to help you get started, I am sharing a few alerts that are applicable to B2B SaaS in general. You can use them as a reference and create alerts for your customers.

1. Onboarding Alerts

When you are onboarding a customer, training new users or onboarding an existing customer for different use-cases/features, you plan an ideal journey that customers should follow to successfully get value. 

In case users/customers deviate from that path, you can set up Alerts and thus start working on the solution.

Or conversely, if you have already trained the user on certain features, then you would want to get an alert when they use it for the 1st time. We call these alerts Onboarding Alerts.

Few examples of onboarding alerts:

Alert me when a customer is stuck in one of the onboarding stages for more than X number of days  Alert me when a dis-engaged customer logs in. Alert me when the customer has used a brand new feature A. Alert me when a customer enters a certain segment - “ Entered 6+ month segment, have not used A feature”. Alert when a new user has been added. Alert when a new customer subscribes to the product.  Alert when a customer authorizes an integration.

2. Renewal Alerts

You should always be on top of the customer renewal cycle. Once you know the customer is up for renewal, you can proactively reach out and understand if the customer is facing any challenges, how you can help them further with their next year's plan, re-emphasizing the value they have received from the product. 

To plan those proactive actions, you can set up a few alerts which will notify you to successfully complete renewals. Few examples of renewal alerts are:

Alert me if a customer is up for renewal in the next 90/30/7 days. Alert me if the customer is up for renewal and the health is Poor. Alert me if the customer is up for renewal and the QBR has not been done in the last 60 days. Alert me when the customer has renewed the contract.

3.  Upsell Alerts

There are certain triggers that can act as a leading indicator for your upselling activities like up-gradation of the plan, new licenses, etc. You would also want to get notified if a customer is using the system extensively so that you can ask for referrals or reviews. 

You can configure those triggers in CustomerSuccessBox and set up the Upsell Alerts. Few examples of upsell alerts can be:

Alert me when license utilization has reached more than 70%. Alert me if the customer is spending more than 10 hours in the last 7 days. You can ask for a review if the user is using the system so extensively. Alert me if the customer is visiting the Pricing Page/clicks the Upgrade button.  Alert me if the NPS is 8+. Alert me when a customer is using a feature A extensively so that you can educate them to use feature B.

4. Risk Alerts

There are certain triggers that are leading indicators of churn. Risk alerts help you to proactively spot if something is going wrong with the customer which needs your immediate attention.

Few examples of risk alerts are as follows:

Alert me if your Point of contact/Power user has not logged in the last X days or their usage has significantly dropped. This can act as a leading indicator, that he/she might be leaving the organization. Alert me if the Power User has been deleted. Alert me when Health of a customer drops from Average to Poor or Good to Poor. Alert me if the last touchpoint was X days back. Alert me if the customer has not logged in since the last X days. Alert me if NPS is below 5. Alert me if the customer has downgraded/canceled the subscription. Alert me if a critical support ticket has not been resolved in the last 5 days. Alert me when a user lands on an “Error page”. Alert me if the customer is in Poor health for more than 30 days. Alert me if the customer has not paid the invoice due in the last 10 days. Alert me if the due amount of invoice is above a certain amount. Alert me when a usage of a critical feature is less than X times in Y days.  Alert me when a customer has spent less than 15 minutes on the platform in the last 7 days. Alert me when usage drops by X% in 30 days. Alert me when a certain feature is used less than X times in the last 15 days. Alert me when a customer has entered a “Dis-engaged customer” segment.

These were a few examples of alerts :)

Get in touch with your Customer Success Manager at CustomerSuccessBox to configure such Alerts for your business and get notified for the most important customer behavior. 

Want to configure in CustomerSuccessBox now? Click here to see the configuration details.

Not a Customer? Request a CustomerSuccessBox Demo and learn how we can help auto-create alerts to draw the attention of your CSMs to the right account.