The Answer Is Buried in Your Invoices
You are great at the work. What you do not have is someone to sit down with a year of sales records and tell you which customers used to buy from you like clockwork and then quietly disappeared. That is a data job, and hiring a data person for one afternoon a quarter makes no sense.
So the quiet churn goes unnoticed. A steady customer stops, and because nobody canceled anything and no alarm went off, you do not notice until you happen to think of them months later, when winning them back is a lot harder.
The Ghost Client Protocol is that missing tech person, for free, inside Claude. You hand it your invoice export, and it hands you back the list you never had the time to build yourself.
What the Skill Actually Does
Paste or upload an export from whatever you use to bill (Shopify, Square, Stripe, QuickBooks, FreshBooks, Toast, or any CSV with a date, an amount, and a customer name), and the skill:
- Learns each repeat customer's own rhythm. It measures the typical gap between a customer's orders, because "quiet" means something different for a monthly client than a quarterly one.
- Flags the ones who ghosted. A customer counts as ghosted when they have gone silent for more than twice their own usual gap. The ones only just past their normal rhythm are flagged as drifting, so you can catch them early.
- Ranks them by money at risk. Each ghost is scored by at-risk annual revenue, a run-rate estimate from what they used to spend, so you work the biggest ones first instead of guessing.
- Writes the win-back note for you. For each client, a short, specific message built from their actual purchase history, not a generic "we miss you" blast.
- Shows its math. It tells you the rule it used, each customer's typical gap, how overdue they are, and where the data is thin, so you can trust the list instead of taking it on faith.
What You Get Back
A ranked table of the customers who went quiet, something like this:
| Customer | Orders | Last order | Usual gap | Days quiet | At-risk/yr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Janice | 6 | Mar 2 | 28 days | 182 | $11,595 |
| Kirk | 4 | May 1 | 31 days | 122 | $6,502 |
| Donald | 3 | Apr 2 | 14 days | 151 | $2,876 |
Real numbers from our own books. The client names are changed. The clear one at the top, a six-invoice client who paid nearly every month and then went silent for six months, is exactly the kind of thing that hides in plain sight until something like this surfaces it.
Under the ghosts you also get a drifting watch list, the customers slipping but not yet gone, where a light touch now is cheap. Then one ready-to-send win-back note per client, written from what they actually bought.
How to Use It
- Download the skill with the button above and add it to your Claude (drop the folder into your skills directory in Claude Code or the desktop app).
- Export your sales. From your billing tool, export orders or invoices to CSV. You need a date, an amount, and a customer column. Names alone are fine.
- Paste or upload it into Claude and ask something like "who stopped buying?" The skill takes it from there and returns the ranked list and the notes.
You need a Claude account and about ten minutes. No spreadsheet formulas, no setup, nothing else to install.
An Honest Word on the Numbers
The skill is careful, and you should be too. It needs at least three orders from a customer before it will read a real rhythm, and it tells you plainly when a result is built on thin history. The at-risk revenue figures are run-rate estimates, not booked losses. Treat the list as "here is who to call this week, biggest first," not a forecast. That honesty is the whole point: a short list you can trust beats a long one you cannot.
Download the Ghost Client Protocol skill and find out who you have been missing.