Two things wearing the same clothes
Most store teams have one notification channel and two completely different kinds of information flowing through it. The first kind needs a human to do something now. The second kind is useful to know and useful to review, but nothing changes in the next hour because of it.
When you mix them, people learn to skim. Once people skim, the urgent ones get missed, and the usual response is to make the urgent ones louder, which trains everyone to skim harder.
The test we use: if a competent person cannot take a useful action within five minutes of seeing this, it is not an alert.
What passes the test
- Stock about to run out on something you are actively advertising. Action: pause the ad set, or pull stock from another location.
- A high-risk order over your value floor. Action: verify or hold before it ships.
- A fulfilment that has not moved in 48 hours. Action: chase the carrier before the customer chases you.
- A return request from a repeat customer sitting unapproved. Action: approve it, or decide not to and say why.
What fails it, and belongs in the daily summary instead
- Every new order. Nobody acts on an order simply existing.
- Daily revenue against target. Important, reviewable, not actionable at 11:04am.
- A product dropping below threshold that you are not advertising and can restock in a week.
- Refund rate creeping up. This needs a conversation, not an interruption.
An alert interrupts someone. If you are not asking for an action, you have spent their attention and bought nothing.
The demotion exercise
Take your current alert rules and, for each one, write the action in the imperative. "Pause the ad set." "Call the customer." "Move stock from the shop." If you cannot write the sentence, demote the rule to the daily summary.
Most teams demote between a third and half of their rules the first time they do this, and every single one reports that the remaining alerts started getting read.
What to do with the demoted ones
Do not delete them. The information was never the problem. The interruption was. Put them in a once-a-day digest that lands before your team starts work, and let people read it in the order they choose.
Store Huddle takes a position here: only two things interrupt anyone (low-stock products and high-risk orders) and everything else waits in Store pulse until someone looks. The point is not fewer facts. It is fewer interruptions carrying the same facts.