The Quiet Account I Never Called

A smoke detector only makes noise when something's wrong. The rest of the time it just sits on the ceiling, and you forget it's measuring anything at all.

I used to think about our customers the same way. If an account wasn't calling, wasn't filing tickets, wasn't showing up in the escalation list, I read that as the account being fine. Better than fine, even — a quiet account was the dream. No fires, no drama, nothing on my desk about them. I'd point to a few of those in reviews as proof the product was working.

One of them churned last year with zero warning. No angry email, no cancellation call, no last-ditch save attempt because there was nothing to save — they were just gone by the time we noticed the invoice hadn't been paid. I went back through the account history looking for the moment it turned, and there wasn't one. It hadn't turned. It had just slowly stopped mattering to them, and nothing in how we watched accounts was built to catch that, because we were only watching for noise.

The part I don't love admitting is how long I held those quiet accounts up as the good ones. I wasn't lazy about it, I was actively wrong — I was treating the absence of a problem as evidence of a strength I hadn't verified. I'd been doing a worse version of this for years before I ran into Grove's stuff on indicators, the idea that if you're only tracking the things that scream at you, you have no idea what's happening in the accounts that don't. That one landed hard because I recognized it immediately. I'd lived it. I just hadn't named it.

What we do differently now is track usage and engagement on the quiet accounts on purpose, not wait for them to generate a ticket. What I'm still not sure about is where the line is between checking in and reminding a fine customer that they could leave. I don't want to manufacture a touchpoint that plants the idea.

If you run customer success — do you proactively check in on the accounts that never complain, or does that feel like poking something that isn't broken?