Noticing when a customer's champion leaves the channel
Who joins and leaves a shared Slack channel tells you a lot about an account. How to notice a champion leaving or a new contact arriving, and what to do next.
The person who asked for the shared channel was your champion. They set it up, pulled in their engineers and answered your questions about how their team works. Six months later, at the renewal call, you meet a new head of operations who has never heard of you. The champion left the company in the spring. Their account in the channel went quiet, and nobody on your side noticed.
Membership changes in a shared channel are some of the clearest signals you get about an account, and they're easy to miss. This post covers which changes matter, how to notice them, and what to do when one happens.
Why membership changes matter
People join and leave shared channels all the time, and most of it is routine. A few kinds of change are worth acting on.
- Your champion leaves. The person who knows why they bought from you is gone. Someone else now decides whether to keep you, and they may not know what you do for them.
- A new contact joins. A new engineer, a new manager or a new admin is a chance to make a good first impression, and a person who may start asking questions soon.
- Several people join at once. Often a sign the customer is rolling your product out to another team.
- Several people leave. It may be a reorganisation, a layoff or a team moving off your product. Any of those is worth a conversation.
None of these is proof of anything on its own. Each is a reason to ask a question.
Why they're easy to miss
Slack can show a short line in the channel when someone joins or leaves, and in a busy channel it is easy to scroll past. Even when it's seen, the people who should care, the account owner and the support lead, may not be in that channel that day.
Nobody reviews member lists for fun. Without a habit or a tool, you hear about a champion leaving from their out-of-office reply.
A habit that works without a tool
You can catch most changes with a short routine.
- Keep a contact list per account. In your CRM or a shared document, note who on the customer's side is in the channel, and which of them is the champion.
- Compare once a month. Check each account's channel members against the list. For a small number of accounts, this takes minutes.
- Watch for the quiet ones. A champion who stops posting may be on their way out. A message to ask how things are going costs nothing.
- Write down who replaced whom. When a contact changes, note it next to the account, so the next person on your team doesn't have to work it out again.
The monthly check is the part that slips. It's easy to do for five accounts and hard to keep up for fifty.
When a champion leaves
Act within the week, not at renewal.
- Check their open requests. Anything the champion asked for that's still open has nobody on the customer's side to read your answer. Find out who should get it now.
- Find the next person. Ask your remaining contacts who is taking over, and offer that person a short call. They inherited your product, not your relationship.
- Tell your account owner. If the person who sees the change isn't the account owner, make sure the owner hears about it the same day.
- Don't say anything in the customer's channel. Announcing that someone left, in front of their former colleagues, is awkward at best. Keep it to your team.
When someone new joins
A new contact is the easy case, but it's still worth a minute.
- Say hello. A short welcome, from a person, with where to ask questions and when your team is around.
- Learn their role. A new admin and a new engineer need different things from you.
- Update your contact list. The next person who looks shouldn't have to guess.
Treat it as one signal, not a score
It's tempting to fold membership changes into a single health number. Resist it at first. A person leaving a channel means very different things at different accounts, and a number hides the context that makes it useful. Start by making the changes visible to the people who own the accounts, and let them decide what each one means. For more on setting up shared channels so these signals reach the right people, see Slack Connect customer support: a practical guide.
How Thorpe handles it
Thorpe tells your triage channel when people from the customer's workspace join or leave a customer channel. It never posts about it in the customer's channel.
- One line per change, such as "Jane Doe (Acme) left #ext-acme". The name in brackets is the account.
- Batched. Changes are collected for 10 minutes per channel, then posted as one message, so a team of five joining doesn't become five alerts.
- Customers only. Your own teammates are never announced.
- On by default. An admin can turn it off with Tell triage when customer people join or leave, in Settings > Channels.
Each account's page in the web app has a People card. It lists the people from that customer who joined one of the account's channels while Thorpe was in it, newest first, with the dates they joined and left. People who were in the channel before Thorpe arrived appear there once they leave.
Thorpe also notices when a channel stops being shared with the customer altogether. It marks the channel Disconnected, pauses the resolution clock on each open request from it, and notes in each request's card thread that the customer can no longer see replies.
If you connect HubSpot, an optional integration, each account takes its owner from HubSpot, and request cards show that owner as CSM, so you know who to tell. Account health, with signals such as days since the customer last wrote and changes in request volume, is coming. It will use no AI and no sentiment scoring.
The channels and stakeholders guide covers the setting and the People list.