HackerRank eliminates one-to-one customer training with Northpass and ChurnZero
HackerRank is a technology hiring platform that helps companies hire skilled developers and innovate faster. They enable tech recruiters and hiring managers to objectively evaluate talent at every stage of the recruiting process.Eliminated
one-to-one training across 3,000+ customers
Improved
time-to-first-value for accounts
Automated
training engagements based on customer data
“The Northpass-ChurnZero integration has been a game changer for us. It gives us vital customer health information and gives our team the insights they need to provide the absolute best customer experiences.”
Alaina Loori, Vice President of Global Customer Success | HackerRank
The Challenge
HackerRank’s product is powerful but requires training before customers can unlock its full potential.
Historically, HackerRank Customer Success managers (CSMs) spent hundreds of hours manually training customers, including every new user to the platform. In some instances, CSMs were responsible for up to 500 accounts, which left little time for strategic initiatives and relationship building.
In addition, its support team was inundated with support tickets from new customers who were unaware of existing resources that could answer their questions.
The Customer Success (CS) team’s one-to-one training sessions were effective but drained resources and kept CSMs from dedicating time to revenue- and retention-generating functions, like success planning, QBRs, and strategic conversations.
HackerRank also needed help tracking training engagement and impact, which is impossible with traditional formats, like PDFs and weekly meetings with CSMs.
HackerRank needed its customer-facing teams to manage a scaling customer base—without increasing headcount. This was when they turned to Northpass and ChurnZero.
The Process
HackerRank set out to build an integrated training program.
HackerRank partnered with Northpass to launch HackerRank Academy, an always-on learning hub to accelerate onboarding and offload manual training responsibilities from CSMs.
To do that, HackerRank worked with Northpass’ implementation and solutions engineering team to customize the learner experience and configure Northpass to automate manual tasks that were the sole responsibility of CSMs.
HackerRank then activated the Northpass-ChurnZero integration, which allowed CSMs to use learning activity as a sign of customer health and sentiment.
CSMs also used the learning data to automate outreach based on course progress and involve customers in their success with customer-facing dashboards and reporting.
HackerRank’s playbook for academy success
HackerRank took five steps to launch its academy and set its customers and CSMs up for success.
1. Set goals and get leadership buy-in
Once the executive team understood the strain on CSMs to get new customers up to speed, getting leadership buy-in was simple. Manual onboarding was time-consuming and impossible to scale, preventing CSMs from focusing on strategic initiatives that increase customer lifetime value (CLTV).
“It was easy to sell customer training to our leadership team,” says Alaina Loori, vice president, global customer success at HackerRank. “We told them it’d free up our CSMs to do more with less, so we wouldn’t have to hire quite as many. In a down economy, that was music to their ears.”
HackerRank set two goals:
- – Scale its CS operation by offloading CSM responsibilities to allow them to focus on functions that drive retention and revenue.
- – Standardize training to ensure customers receive a consistent onboarding experience.
2. Find the right learning management system
When looking for a learning management system (LMS), HackerRank prioritized a clean design to ensure it could create a seamless learning experience across brand touchpoints, including its product and websites.
Tracking was also top of mind for its CS operations team so they could understand the content’s impact and how the program was influencing customer health scores.
3. Launch a minimum viable academy
HackerRank launched a minimum viable “academy” (MVA) with two courses.
While HackerRank started small, the academy proved valuable immediately by removing the need for CSM-led training and freeing up those team members to focus on retention and expansion.
The time-saving and efficiency gains also allowed CSMs to do more with less. As a result, HackerRank didn’t need to hire CSMs and implementation managers to keep up with its growing customer base.
“The HackerRank Academy helps our existing CSMs provide personalized support to more accounts, which has essentially eliminated my need to increase headcount,” says Alaina.
4. Connect Northpass and ChurnZero
HackerRank uses ChurnZero to measure customer health in real time and wanted to incorporate learning data—via Northpass—into dashboards, workflows, and reporting.
The team used learning activities such as course enrollment, quiz scores, and learning path progress as a signal of customer health, which helped them increase product adoption and reduce churn.
With the Northpass integration, HackerRank’s CS team uses ChurnZero to:
- – Segment customers using learner data to send timely communications via automated plays.
- – Easily access LMS data and reports on account and contact profiles.
- – Share real-time learning and adoption progress using ChurnZero’s customer-facing dashboard.
- – Empower the enablement team to make data-driven decisions about courses.
- – Compare learning data against key churn factors to better understand the academy’s impact on retention.
5. Iterate and improve
Since launching the HackerRank Academy, the CS operations team has added more onboarding courses and learning paths to provide additional value to customers.
“All new customers go through academy training during the onboarding process,” says Alaina. “As a result, we’re no longer spending time on one-to-one training, which has created more efficiency for the team.”
Now that HackerRank has proven the academy’s value, the focus has turned to providing value throughout the customer lifecycle, starting with training customers on new product launches.
Once these courses are built, HackerRank plans to integrate Northpass’ data into its customer health program in ChurnZero to improve forecasting accuracy and better predict potential churn.
The team also plans to use ChurnZero’s in-app communications, which will allow it to suggest training based on previous courses and product usage, as well as congratulatory messages for course completion.
The Impact
Since launching the HackerRank Academy with Northpass and integrating the data into ChurnZero, the team has:
- – More bandwidth and customer coverage: By automating aspects of CSM’s workload and eliminating the need for one-to-one customer training, HackerRank’s CS team increased account coverage by 4x. CSMs now dedicate more time to revenue-generating engagements, like success planning and QBRs.
- – Standardized training: Northpass helped HackerRank centralize its training program, allowing it to standardize training and ensure CSMs delivered the same onboarding experience.
- – Faster onboarding: By offloading mundane and repetitive tasks from the CSMs day-to-day and enabling its customers to learn on their own time with an on-demand academy, HackerRank is improving time-to-first-value (TTFV) for customers.
- – Measurable training: Before Northpass, HackerRank used YouTube videos and webinars to augment one-to-one training, which it couldn’t measure. With Northpass, the team is diving into customer-level insights to understand learning activities and are having strategic conversations based on them.
- – Better customer insights: By bringing learning data into ChurnZero, HackerRank CSMs are detecting potential red flags to a customer’s training success and mitigating churn risk.
- – Increased customer accountability: HackerRank uses ChurnZero to share account and user training progress reports so that customers understand where they stand against their goals and what actions they need to take to reach them.
