Signals
Signals: the topics your customers keep raising
Signals (in the Insights menu) automatically surfaces the topics that keep coming up in your customer exchanges: feature requests, bugs, friction points, churn signals... You have no categories to create and no interactions to tag by hand. For each topic, you know how many customers are talking about it and how much revenue is involved.
# Mentions and topics
Signals relies on two notions:
- Mention: one specific point raised in an interaction (a feature request, an adoption blocker, a churn signal, a compliment...). Each mention keeps its verbatim, meaning the exact wording in its original language, along with a link to the interaction it came from.
- Topic: a group of mentions that talk about the same thing. For example, "the export is too slow", "the report takes two minutes to load" and "I can't get my data out on Fridays" form a single topic, even though your customers did not use the same words.
Topics are recomputed every night: a topic can grow, merge into another, or split when it becomes too broad.
Each topic belongs to a family: Product, Adoption & service, Risk, Revenue, Relationship or Trust.
Why it helps
A topic cuts across your accounts. That is what lets you answer the question "how many customers are telling me this?", which no single interaction can answer.
# The topics list
# Default filters
Whatever family you select, two filters are applied by default:
- Period: the last 90 days.
- Number of customers: only topics mentioned by at least 2% of your non-churned customers are shown, with a maximum threshold of 5 customers.
For example, with 150 non-churned customers, 2% is 3 customers: topics mentioned by at least 3 customers are shown. With 600 non-churned customers, 2% is 12 customers: the threshold is then capped at 5 customers.
You can change these filters at any time (see Filter, save, export).
# Columns
By default, topics are sorted by number of accounts affected, not by number of mentions: one customer repeating the same thing ten times weighs less than ten customers saying it once.
Each row shows:
- The mention kind (feature request, adoption blocker, churn signal...) and its family.
- The number of accounts and mentions over the period.
- The new accounts, raising this topic for the first time.
- The movement, which shows what changed recently (see Movements).
- The ARR or MRR exposed, meaning the revenue carried by the accounts involved.
- The average sentiment and the maximum severity.
As in every view in Skalin, you can change the order of the columns.
# Viewing a topic
Click on a row to open the topic in a side panel. You will find:
- The topic's family and the total number of mentions related to it.
- A summary of the topic.
- The tasks linked to the topic.
- The Product lifecycle block, only for topics in the Product family (see Tracking the product lifecycle).
- The mentions chart over time.
- The list of verbatims, which you can filter by customer.
On each verbatim, you can:
- Click on it to open the source of the mention.
- Remove the mention from the topic, if it does not belong there.
# Acting on a topic
From a topic, you can:
- Create a task.
- Rename the topic.
- Merge the topic into another topic.
- Pin the topic: it comes back to the top of the list, whatever sort you picked.
- Mute the topic: it disappears from the lists. Its mentions keep counting in the totals, muting a topic does not delete any data. This is useful for recurring noise or an irrelevant grouping.
Pinning and muting do not expire.
Muting
A muted topic is muted for every user in your workspace, not just for you.
# Tracking the product lifecycle
For topics in the Product family, the Product lifecycle block lets you record where the decision stands: under review, planned, shipped or declined. You can add a note and, if you want, a link to the matching ticket in your product tool. Every change is traced: who, when, what.
A topic marked shipped or declined lets you answer the customer the next time they raise it, instead of rediscovering the request.
# Movements
Knowing that a topic exists is not enough: week after week, the useful question is what moved. The movement is a badge telling you, for each topic, why you should look at it now.
A topic carries only one movement at a time. The rules below are evaluated in order, and the first one that matches wins.
# 🌱 New
The topic did not exist before the displayed period: this is the first time it appears, across all your accounts. Since it has no history to compare against, this rule is evaluated first.
What it tells you: a new concern in your base, often linked to a release, a pricing change or a competitor's move.
# 📈 Accelerating
The topic is well above its usual pace, measured over the previous twelve weeks.
This is not a measure of growth in volume. A topic running at 200 mentions a week that gains 20 does not fire: that is its normal variation. A topic going from 4 to 10 mentions does fire: for that topic, it is an event. A "+50%" threshold would surface the biggest topics every week, since they mechanically carry the biggest swings. Comparing each topic against its own normal is what makes the genuine surprises surface.
Three conditions keep false alarms out:
- At least 3 mentions in the period.
- At least 4 weeks of history, to establish a normal.
- A perfectly steady topic is not declared abnormal over one extra mention.
What it tells you: something unusual happened on this topic. It is the most actionable movement.
# 🔀 Spreading
Accounts that had never raised this topic are starting to. An account counts as new on a topic if its very first mention falls inside the displayed period. At least two accounts must be involved.
This movement catches a slow contagion: the topic's volume stays flat, but it reaches more and more accounts. The New accounts column shows exactly the number that triggers this badge.
What it tells you: an irritant leaving its original circle. Often the best moment to act, while it is still small in volume but already widespread.
# Stable
All other topics, which is the vast majority. They are shown with a simple dash, so that badges stay visible on the rows that matter.
# The "What's new" shortcut
The What's new button in the filter bar applies the last 7 days and keeps only the topics carrying a movement. It is the view to open on Monday morning, and it is where the weekly digest links land.
Movement depends on the displayed period
Movements describe what happened over the period you chose. Over 90 days, "accelerating" means the quarter was unusual; over 7 days, that the week was.
# The weekly digest
Every Monday, an email sums up what moved: new topics, accelerations and spreads, with one verbatim per line and a direct link to the topic.
The digest is built not to repeat itself:
- A featured topic does not come back for four weeks, unless it has clearly worsened.
- A single email never carries two topics from the same family.
- On quiet weeks, it surfaces your blind spots: the topics with the highest exposed revenue that nobody has handled yet.
- If nothing deserves your attention, no email is sent.
You can turn off the digest from My profile, independently of Skalin's other weekly emails.
# Filter, save, export
Filters apply both to mentions (kind, sentiment, severity, period) and to accounts (segment, owner, tags, stage, agreement). For example, you can display the topics raised by your accounts above €50k ARR whose agreement is coming up for renewal.
You can save a set of filters as a view and share it with your team (see Saving a view from filters).
Everything displayed exports to CSV, at topic or mention level. The export replays exactly the filters you applied: the file says the same thing as the page.