At-risk account
A customer showing credible signals that it may churn — declining usage, disengaged stakeholders, unresolved problems — early enough that action can still change the outcome.
An at-risk account is a customer whose behavior signals a meaningful chance of churning before its next renewal. The signals rarely arrive as a cancellation notice; they arrive as trend lines: product usage sliding over weeks, the champion who stops replying, a spike in support tickets, a detractor NPS response nobody followed up, or a sponsor leaving the company. Individually each signal is ambiguous — together they form a pattern that experienced CS teams learn to treat as a fire alarm.
The operational failure mode is spotting risk without acting on it: an "at-risk list" that only ever grows. A working process attaches every flag to an owner, a save play, and a due date, and weighs risk against renewal proximity and contract value so the team spends effort where action still changes the outcome. Teams typically formalize this with health scoring to detect the pattern and playbooks to standardize the response.