How Hootsuite Blends Human and Digital CS to Lift Onboarding Graduation from 76% to 83%

When Brittney Pelfrey joined Hootsuite as Senior Director, Customer Experience & Strategy, onboarding was one of the first areas she wanted to strengthen. It wasn’t that nothing was happening — a series of onboarding emails ran in Journey Orchestrator — but the process was ad hoc: those emails reached only some customers, because only some teams had opted in, it was tied to outdated product usage habits that hadn’t been refreshed to see if they drive long-term retention.

Working with her data team, Brittney redefined the onboarding flow around a specific product-usage habit tied to long-term retention, then rebuilt the journey in Gainsight to drive customers down what she calls the “happy path.” In six weeks, the share of customers reaching that habit by their 90-day graduation climbed from about 76% to 83%.

Hootsuite is the social media management platform used by thousands of organizations to plan, publish, and measure their social presence. Brittney Pelfrey — a Gainsight user since 2014 — was brought in to unify Hootsuite’s customer experience from pre-sales through renewal and expansion, reporting to the Chief Customer Officer. She started where she believes retention is won or lost: the first 90 days. At the time, onboarding was inconsistent and ad hoc, with no shared definition of a well-onboarded customer and little visibility into who was building the habits that lead to renewal. The bet was that a consistent, measurable onboarding motion — powered primarily by Journey Orchestrator — could turn onboarding from an activity into a retention lever.

Onboarding at Hootsuite was inconsistent. A series of onboarding emails ran in Journey Orchestrator, but because adoption varied across onboarding teams, only some customers received them. These teams also lacked a consistent definition of what a well-onboarded customer looked like, making it harder to measure progress across the customer base.

Instead of starting with tactics, the team first defined what successful onboarding should look like. Working with Hootsuite’s data team, they defined “healthy product usage” — a customer using the product in a meaningful way at least weekly — and measured how many customers reached it by the 90-day mark. That gave them a target to reverse-engineer the journey against.

For Brittney, Gainsight isn’t a destination so much as connective tissue. As she puts it, “Gainsight is a tool in our tech stack that can facilitate CSM workflows, calls to action, manager accountability, reporting, and the data architecture of our health score” — the layer that pushes work through Hootsuite’s service model rather than a place CSMs have to visit.

That framing extends to how she defines “digital.” At Hootsuite, digital isn’t a synonym for email; it’s every way the team can reach a customer without human-led outreach — email campaigns in Journey Orchestrator, in-product flows, one-to-many webinar invitations, and any artifact a customer can engage with in their own space.

From there, they designed a new onboarding journey, and Journey Orchestrator became the engine that delivered it. Instead of sending every customer through the same sequence of emails, the journey adapts based on customer behavior. If a customer has already connected their social media accounts, they move to the next stage of onboarding; if they haven’t, they receive additional guidance tailored to that step. And if a customer still isn’t progressing after multiple touchpoints, Journey Orchestrator automatically creates a call to action (CTA) so a CSM can step in. Once the customer is back on track, they seamlessly rejoin the digital journey.

That balance is the part Brittney is most deliberate about.

The digital flow scales across the whole base; the human touch shows up precisely where a customer is at risk instead of everywhere at once. That same approach also had to scale globally. Hootsuite supports customers around the world, so the team uses Gainsight Assist to deliver those journeys and templates in five to six languages — which lets a CSM anywhere engage a customer in their preferred language without recreating the content for every region.

Six weeks after launching the rebuilt journey, Hootsuite moved graduation against that usage milestone from roughly 76% to 83% across its customer cohorts. More important than the jump is what the metric now means to the business: the team has found that health usage habits in onboarding correlate to higher rates of long term retention — and that customers who reach healthy habits by graduation tend to sustain them. Onboarding, in other words, stopped being an activity report and became a retention lever the business can actually pull.

Beyond the immediate results, it also gave the team a repeatable model for improving onboarding across the business. Rather than relying on disconnected, team-by-team approaches, the organization now has a consistent framework for driving adoption, measuring customer health, and scaling the onboarding practices that work.

Hootsuite is now cloning the same onboarding philosophy across its other products, applying the definition-first, digital-plus-human approach that worked for the core platform. The throughline is the same one that made the first project work: meet every customer where they are, let the digital journey scale, and bring a human in exactly when it counts — with the data to prove it moved the number.

Looking ahead, they see AI and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) as the next evolution of that strategy. Rather than simply generating content, they envisions MCP orchestrating work across the customer lifecycle — automating account handoffs from Sales to Customer Success, spinning up pre-populated Success Plans, surfacing the right notifications at the right time, and streamlining CTA workflows so account managers can take action without navigating complex processes.