HackerRank takes control of customer health and reduces churn with Pendo + ChurnZero

In the world of remote work, being able to find the right talent, no matter where they are, is an important leg up for businesses. HackerRank is a leading technical hiring platform that matches software developers with great companies. Alaina Loori, director of customer success operations, manages HackerRank’s scaled customer success, customer enablement, and technical services teams. She is also responsible for the customer success (CS) tech stack, integrations, and data analytics. 

When Loori joined, HackerRank didn’t have an effective way to track and evaluate the health of its 3,000+ customers. Customer success managers (CSMs) had no way to identify which customers were struggling, who needed outreach, or what healthy product usage truly looked like. Because of this, customer support was reactive; customers had to reach out to HackerRank proactively when something was wrong. The CS team was too tactical and technical, stuck running the same manual processes to reactively address problems. 

As Loori explains, “Our CS team was very tactical, logging into individual customers’ systems to evaluate usage, versus being able to have a toolset to surface the customers that needed the most support.” 

What the HackerRank CS team truly needed was the visibility to help customers before they even had to ask for it. They needed a solution to scale the team, help them identify customer needs, and create a delightful customer experience.

Taking a data-driven approach to customer success

As HackerRank becomes more product led, teams across the business have embraced product data to inform their work and improve the customer experience. HackerRank’s product team was already using Pendo for product analytics and in-app guidance. The CS team, in the meantime, was using ChurnZero to identify at-risk customers.

In order to streamline how they collect and analyze product data, the CS team integrated all product data sources—from Pendo, Zendesk, and the HackerRank product itself—with ChurnZero to create one comprehensive ChurnScore. This gave the CS team one source for product usage insights: Login frequency, key feature adoption, number of clicks, dropoff points, and more. 

In the old world, CSMs were manually checking on each of their customers. Now, ChurnZero notifies CSMs and triggers outreach based on key churn indicators, so they can proactively address problems. With multiple sources of product data coming in, CSMs get alerted if customer usage changes, so they can use the data to make an informed observation: Does something look off, or is this a typical spike or lull in their customer’s hiring? 

This unified, comprehensive view into customer health gives CSMs the gift of focus. CSMs now have the insight to help them prioritize which customers they support, and how, based on customers who need the most attention, those whose behaviors have changed, and those who weren’t leveraging key product areas. This makes it simple for HackerRank’s CS team to scale and provide more proactive support. Pendo’s quantitative product data, combined with the CSM’s natural gut instinct, leads to better customer outreach.

As Loori explains, this comprehensive approach to customer support has changed the way the CS team works. 

“Through Pendo’s product data, we can see if customers are using the parts of the product that will add the most value,” says Loori. “And if not, we can trigger alerts to our CS team to proactively reach out. This enables us to scale and focus on customers who need the most attention.”

Reducing churn and turning customers into advocates

In the first three months after launching the customer health program, HackerRank reduced churn for at-risk customers by over 50%, having an immediate revenue impact for the business. 

The impact goes beyond revenue, though. HackerRank’s CS team can now work smarter with strategic customer outreach. According to Loori, the changes the team has made aren’t rocket science. 

“It’s just about making sure the things that need to be addressed are visible,” Loori says. “Once we were able to identify who was in the red, we could start reaching out to those customers with specific messages and objectives in mind. Not just, ‘hey how’s it going,’ but instead, ‘we see you haven’t invited any candidates yet, let’s work through this together.’ Reaching out with a more tailored message has significantly reduced our churn risk.”

With Pendo and ChurnZero, the team at HackerRank can better serve customer-specific product usage insights at business reviews. Both provide CS with the ability to turn healthy customers into advocates, and create patterns to help customers succeed.