12-point CRM journey monitoring audit
A 30-minute pass a CRM lead can run against their stack to surface what is broken without flagging. No signup, no email gate. Use it, share it, fork it.
How to use this
Run it once a quarter, or after any platform change
Most of these checks take two to three minutes once you know where to look. Set aside 30 uninterrupted minutes, work top to bottom, and write down what you find. Anything that returns "I do not know how to check this" is the answer to where your stack has a blind spot.
The audit is vendor-neutral. The terms below map cleanly across every major sending platform: a flow is a flow, a segment is a segment, a suppression list is a suppression list. Where your tool uses different vocabulary, translate as you go.
The 12 checks
Run top to bottom, write down what you find
Trigger events still firing
For every active flow, pull a 7-day count of the trigger event by name. A step change to zero is almost never a quiet week. It is usually a renamed property, a removed integration, or a workflow upstream that stopped emitting.
Segments roughly the right size
For every active segment, compare today's size against 30 days ago. Any swing greater than 25 percent that does not match a known campaign change deserves a look. Segments drift quietly; that drift is where cohorts fall off the back.
Suppression list integrity
Export this week's additions to the suppression list. Spot check 20 rows for legitimate active recipients caught in a bounce sweep, an aggressive list-hygiene rule, or a one-time hard-bounce that should not have stuck.
Merge tags resolve
List every merge tag and dynamic field in every active template. Verify the source property is still being emitted upstream with the same name and casing. Renamed properties render as blanks, which the sending platform records as a successful send.
Inbox-side check on top five flows
Put a monitored address in the audience for your five highest-stakes flows. Verify the message arrives in the inbox, not spam, inside the expected window. The platform reports delivered; the audit answers whether anyone actually received it.
Mailbox provider split
Pull a 7-day delivered-to-bounce ratio per inbox provider. The two largest consumer providers carry most of your volume and most of your placement risk. A divergence between providers is the early signal that one of them has changed its mind about you.
Authentication alignment
Confirm DMARC, DKIM, and SPF all align on every active sending domain. Investigate anything sitting in a DMARC failure report older than 24 hours. Misalignment quietly tanks placement; nobody bounces the message, the inbox provider simply files it elsewhere.
Sender reputation
Pull this week's sender reputation score for every active sending domain and IP pool. A trend down is a leading indicator for silent placement drift. By the time the dashboard shows it, customers have already missed a cycle.
Send cadence matches plan
For each scheduled or behaviourally-triggered flow, compare actual send count against expected for the last 7 days versus the prior 7. A 30 percent gap is not noise. Half the silent-send failures we see are visible here first if you bother to look.
Frequency capping
Pull a random sample of 10 active customers. Verify they are receiving neither too many nor too few sends versus your stated frequency policy. Caps drift quietly when new flows ship without being added to the capping rule set.
Contact typology and exclusion rules
Pull a sample of 10 active contacts across every lifecycle stage and persona type. For each, list the journeys they should be enrolled in against the journeys they actually receive. Exclusion rules quietly accumulate; a contact opted out of one campaign type can end up dropped from every flow. The platform records that as intended behaviour, so the gap rarely shows in dashboards.
Transactional fallthrough
For order confirmation, password reset, booking confirmation, and 2FA, time the gap from event emit to inbox arrival. If any of these exceeds 60 seconds end to end, find out why. Customers call support inside 90 seconds; you do not have margin to spare.
What comes next
Turn the audit into a standing alarm
The audit answers the question "what is broken without flagging right now". The harder question is "what would I miss the next time something breaks". Inbox-side monitoring sits in the same audience as your customers, watches the inbox, and alerts when a flow stops landing. It is the version of point 5 that runs continuously instead of once a quarter.
Telltide does exactly this. One monitor free. Try it in 60 seconds without an account, or read how it works on the product page.
Related reading
Concepts the audit assumes
Watch your flows from the inbox
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