Five alerts, not fifty
We launch every account with the same five internal alerts and resist adding more for at least a month: a hot lead (high-value form or repeat visitor), a conversation that needs a human (bot hand-off or a question the automation can't answer), an unhappy customer (negative review-request reply or complaint keywords), a high-value deal gone stale, and an automation error from an external tool. Everything else is a report, not an alert.
Route to a person, not a channel
An alert in a shared channel is everyone's job, which means nobody's. Each alert has a named owner based on the contact's assigned user, with a fallback if that user is off. GoHighLevel can send to the assigned user directly by SMS, email or in-app notification. The manager sees a daily digest, not every ping.
Write the action first
CALL NOW: Sarah Mitchell (RoofRight enquiry, $12k est.) submitted the quote form 40 seconds ago. Mobile: 0400 000 000. Open: [link]Hot-lead alert to the assigned rep
The first words tell the owner what to do. The details that let them do it follow. A link to the contact is always included. Alerts that open with "New notification from workflow 14" get ignored within a week.
Escalation
Each alert has a response window. A hot lead not contacted in fifteen minutes during business hours re-alerts the rep, then goes to the manager at thirty. A hand-off not picked up in an hour goes to whoever is next in the round-robin. Escalation is what turns an alert from a suggestion into a commitment, and it's the reason first-response times hold up when people are busy.
Alerts outside working hours go to a morning digest, not a 2am text, unless the client has chosen 24-hour coverage. Respecting the team's off-hours is part of why they keep the alerts switched on.
Review the noise monthly
Once a month we look at every alert type and ask: how many fired, how many were acted on, how fast? Anything with a low action rate is either rewritten or deleted. Alerts earn their place by changing behaviour. The five we start with usually survive; the ones added in a hurry usually don't.
Key takeaways
- Start with five alerts: hot lead, human hand-off needed, unhappy customer, stale high-value deal, automation error.
- Every alert goes to a named owner with a fallback, not to a general channel.
- First line states the action. Details come after.
- If an alert isn't acted on in a set time, escalate to the next person automatically.
- Once a month, delete the alerts nobody acted on.