You’ve all heard the saying before…
An elephant never forgets.
And numbers can’t lie.
Hmmm…maybe I’ve got confused there, but separately, both can be true.
A dashboard is a factual record based on data. And whilst it also may not lie, it also doesn’t tell you the ‘why’ behind anything.
Before any signal such as a dropped app open or a paused subscription, gets treated as fact and fed into a campaign, put it through these checks first.
- Rule out a data problem before a customer problem. Did an app update break an event? Did a tag stop firing? Check your release calendar first. A “drop” that lines up with a platform update points to engineering before it points to the customer.
- Confirm you’re actually looking at one customer. If the same person exists as three or four separate profiles across your systems, a signal on one profile might just be activity that moved to another. Check identity resolution before you check behaviour.
- Ask what else could explain it. Before assigning a motive (churned, or simply disengaged), write down at least one alternative explanation that has nothing to do with your brand: privacy, or simply a change in their life you’ll never see in the data. If you can’t think of one, you haven’t looked hard enough.
- Trust a control group comparison over your gut. “This feels low” isn’t a benchmark. Compare against a real baseline, a control group or a fair year-on-year comparison, before deciding the number means anything.
- Check how long it’s actually been going on. One quiet week is noise. Twelve quiet weeks is a pattern. Most CRM teams react to the first and miss the second.
- Go and ask, if you possibly can. A support ticket works. An actual chat with an actual person works better.
- Don’t let one signal trigger an automated decision on its own. A single data point can start an investigation. It shouldn’t single-handedly start a win-back campaign or flip a churn flag.
Behaviour is a signal, not an answer. Treat it like one, and your CRM programme gets sharper every time it’s wrong, instead of just louder.
The Agentic CRM Playbook goes deeper on how to build this kind of validation into a CRM programme by design.
