DDI Improves Retention with ChurnZero

Development Dimension International (DDI), a leadership development advisory firm, helps companies and organizations develop better leaders through assessments, leadership courses, and its Continuous Leadership Intelligence strategy.

The company, which is based in Pittsburgh, Pa., and has more than 1,000 employees across 42 offices in 26 countries, grew quickly after moving from a transaction model to a subscription model a few years ago. It was founded in 1970, but it wasn’t scaling with its customer growth, according to Alex Smith, its director of customer success.

“Our team determined that we needed a software solution to help support our customer success function and to help support our customers,” Smith recalls. “We realized that we needed more technology and better processes to help us grow and scale and to give our customers great support as we were growing.”

DDI engaged a large internal team for the selection process, involving various technicians and senior leaders, according to Smith. “We felt we needed a technology that had good support in standing up and connecting to our systems. We also wanted a partner whose engagement level matched ours.”

DDI looked at what Smith calls a short list of available solutions in the customer success space before choosing ChurnZero.

“They have a crawl-walk-run model in terms of how they launch, partner with us, and get the solution off the ground. That’s what really sold us,” Smith says. “Starting a new technology with a company that’s been around for more than half a century can be a little bit challenging.”

One of the biggest challenges was determining what its customer success team would look like. “We had the platform before we had the customer success team,” Smith says.

Another challenge was integrating ChurnZero with its existing CRM and other systems. “And then we needed to figure out what was realistic in terms of timing to get it off the ground and be functional,” Smith explains.

DDI went live with ChurnZero in 2025. The business leadership consulting firm is currently using the following technologies from ChurnZero:

• HealthScores/ChurnScores, which measure and monitor the health of DDI’s customer accounts using DDI-defined metrics;
• Segments, which enables DDI to segment customers by activity, account status, size, product, industry, features used, and a variety of other factors;
• Journeys, which creates interactive paths to success that guide customers from a starting point to DDI’s determined goal, measuring progress against an expected timeline;
• real-time alerts delivered via multiple channels, including the ChurnZero app, email, and Microsoft Teams chatbots; and
• customer playbooks, with automated workflows that enable the customer success team to scale engagements and tasks.

“It’s worked really well,” Smith says. “Our retention numbers have improved significantly.”

Revenue renewal is up by 10 percent (gross) and 6 percent (net), while customer retention is up by 7 percent.

Smith credits the growth to ChurnZero’s digital capabilities. “Everything we were doing before was manual. ChurnZero is like a one-stop shop for [customer service management] teams. If there are three support tickets from a customer within a week, there’s an alert.”

DDI set up different alerts for different customer segments and for different scenarios. There are advanced alerts for larger customers. The platform also enables DDI to automate scheduling of different programs for different customers; receive automated reminders to check in with customers to confirm that services are being delivered as expected and whether the customer has unfilled needs that DDI could fill.

ChurnZero recently launched AI capabilities, which DDI is just starting to implement. It’s a feature Smith expects to provide a more objective view of the standing of the company and its products with its customers.

“There are also other things that we can do [with the technology] to be better partners for our customers, which is a core value of DDI,” Smith says.

The Payoff

With ChurnZero, DDI has achieved the following results:

• improved customer retention by 7 percent;
• grown gross revenue renewals by 10 percent; and
• increased net revenue renewals by 6 percent.