Are there customers slipping through the cracks?

Customer churn starts long before the cancellation email

You had a great client. They paid $4,800 a month like clockwork. Then one month they skipped. Your team was busy, nobody reached out. Another month passed. By the time someone noticed, the client had already signed with a competitor. That is $57,600 a year gone, and you had a two-month window to save it.

The pattern is always the same. A customer goes quiet. Their CRM record shows no recent activity. Their payment cadence changes. But nobody is looking at both signals at the same time, so nobody connects the dots until the revenue line drops.

The customers most at risk are not the ones who complain. They are the ones who go silent. And in most businesses, silent customers are invisible.

How to spot a customer who is slipping away

You need to look at two things together: engagement and revenue. A customer is slipping when:

• No CRM activity in 30+ days. No calls logged, no emails sent, no meetings scheduled. Your team has not touched this account.
• Payment gap or declining purchase frequency. They used to order monthly. Now it has been 45 days. Or their order size dropped by 30%.
• Open deal in CRM that has stalled. There is a renewal or upsell opportunity sitting in the pipeline with no recent activity.
• High-value customer with no assigned owner. The rep who managed the account left, and nobody picked it up.

How to find at-risk customers manually (step by step)

This requires pulling data from your CRM and your accounting software and comparing activity dates.

Step 1: Export customer activity from your CRM

1. 1
   In HubSpot: CRM → Contacts → export with activity data

   Go to CRM → Contacts. Click “Export” and include the “Last Activity Date” and “Associated Company” properties. This tells you the last time anyone on your team interacted with each contact.

2. 2
   In Salesforce: Reports → Accounts with Last Activity

   Create an Account report and add the “Last Activity Date” field. Sort by last activity ascending so the stalest accounts appear first. Export to CSV.

Step 2: Export payment history from accounting

1. 3
   In QuickBooks Online: Reports → Sales by Customer Summary

   Set the date range to the last 6 months. Export to Excel. This shows total revenue per customer. Customers with declining or zero revenue in recent months are at risk.

2. 4
   In Xero: Business → Invoices → export by contact

   Export all invoices for the last 6 months. In a spreadsheet, pivot by contact name and find the most recent invoice date for each customer.

Step 3: Cross-reference in a spreadsheet

1. 5
   Combine CRM activity dates with payment dates

   For each customer, you need two columns: “Last CRM Activity” and “Last Invoice/Payment.” Flag any customer where both dates are more than 30 days ago.

2. 6
   Sort by annual revenue to prioritize

   A $500/year customer going quiet is different from a $60,000/year customer going quiet. Weight your list by revenue so the biggest risks surface first.

Why a one-time check is not enough

Customers slip through the cracks continuously. The client who was fine last month might go silent this month. The rep who was on top of a key account might get reassigned. You need this check running every single month, and in practice that means it needs to be automatic.

Manual checks degrade quickly. The first month you are thorough. The second month you skim. By the third month, the spreadsheet is outdated and you have stopped looking at it entirely.

Or let Bottomline watch your customers for you

Bottomline connects to your CRM and accounting software and continuously monitors customer engagement and payment patterns. When a customer goes quiet on both fronts, it surfaces them in your monthly report with the dollar value at risk.

No exports. No spreadsheets. No manual name matching. Bottomline watches every customer across both systems and tells you who needs attention before you lose them. The report shows the dollar value at stake so you know exactly where to focus.