Understanding Anomaly Detection

There's nothing worse than missing the early warning signs. With Anomaly Alerts, you can surface the risks, stay on top of potential opportunities, and address them before it's too late.

Alerts set up with the Anomaly Detection workflow are triggered when our algorithm detects a value far outside what we’d usually expect.

We take your data from the last calendar week and compare it to the previous six months, to see if there’s anything significantly different. In other words, it shows you when something ‘out of the ordinary is happening.

These alerts are collated into a single email or slack message and delivered weekly.

Example alert is below:

How do I set up Anomaly Alerts?

Go to the Workflows page, create a new Workflow, and select the Anomaly detected trigger type. Choose between Net sentiment and Volume of responses.

You can add any additional conditions you’d like, such as language or region, and set up alerts to be sent via email or Slack.

You can adjust the frequency for how often alerts are detected, choosing from either from either Daily, Weekly or Monthly.

For example, a daily setting would check your data for anomalies every day, whilst weekly alerts would only look for these once a week. You can adjust these based on how volatile or important your different business areas are.

You can also adjust the sensitivity of alerts to either High, Medium or Low, with each altering the threshold required for an alert to be sent.

Alerts sent with a High threshold will require a large deviation from the expected range. For example if your net sentiment is usually on average 50, a significant change of +/- 50% would be required for a High Sensitivity alert to be fired.

Alerts sent with a Low threshold only require a small deviation from the expected range. For example, if your net sentiment is usually on average a value of 50, then only a small deviation of +/- 5% would trigger an alert. For the same scenario, a Medium sensitivity alert would require a deviation of around +/- 20%.

You can expect Alerts sent with a Low sensitivity to trigger more often than High or Medium sensitivity ones, so you can adjust these depending on the importance of the business areas you’re monitoring.

What’s included in Anomaly Alerts?

Alerts include where the anomaly came from, charts showing the anomalies, and links to open these in Chattermill (only individuals with Chattermill logins will be able to view these). You can edit the subject line included in each alert.

What types of data can I set up alerts for?

Currently, you can set up Anomaly Alerts for Volume of Responses and Net Sentiment. In future versions, we hope to include more options. If there’s a specific metric you’d love to see, please let us know here!

Can I add filters?

You can add any filters available in your project (e.g. language, region, customer type).

How often will I receive alerts?

You will receive Anomaly Alerts depending on what you’ve set the frequency of the alert to. We won't send you an alert if we do not detect any anomalies for a specific period.

Can I send alerts to other people?

Yes, you can enter any email address you’d like! You can also send alerts to Slack, where you can alert anyone in your company’s Slack workspace.

Can I send alerts outside of Email or Slack?

Not yet, but if you’re keen to send alerts to one of our existing integrations (Zendesk, or via Webhook) or you’d like to see a new integration such as JIRA, please don’t hesitate to get in touch here!

I’d like to speak to someone to discuss this feature.

Excellent news - please book a feedback session at a time that suits you here. You’ll be speaking directly with our product team, who can answer any questions and are always thrilled to hear your feedback.

What if I’m receiving email alerts, but haven’t set anything up?

If you can access the Workflows page yourself, then you can edit the Workflow and remove your email address from the recipients list. If you cannot access the Workflow, please contact support, and we will help you.