At Pendo, we know what it means to chase both sides of the retention equation. We look at Gross Revenue Retention (GRR) to tell us how well we’re retaining customers, and Net Revenue Retention (NRR) to discover how well we’re growing those relationships.
For Sneha Raghavan, Pendo’s vice president of customer experience, those numbers are more than metrics. They’re a mandate.”My mission is to keep churn down, and keep costs reasonable while doing that,” she said.
Starting with a familiar challenge
Raghavan’s team needed to scale proactive, strategic engagement without adding headcount or losing quality.
“We had custom-built health scores from our data science team," Raghavan explained. "But they grew outdated quickly with the pace of our product development, making them difficult to act upon even though they were accurate. Our team was limited in how to use them at scale.”
Her team needed a better signal and clear direction on what to do next. So they started a trial with Forwrd.ai, now Pendo Predict, which gave them faster answers and insightful data they could trust. This success eventually led to Pendo acquiring Forwrd.ai.
Predicting risk and opportunity, right inside Salesforce
Pendo Predict plugs into Pendo’s product usage and business data to generate the AI predictions, and pushes insights into the tools our teams already use, like Salesforce and Slack. Instead of static scores, reps get context-rich alerts: who’s at risk, why they were flagged, and what action to take.
“If a champion hasn’t logged in for 30+ days, that’s a risk indicator,” said Raghavan. “But it’s the ‘why’ that builds trust. Pendo Predict shows product adoption trends and engagement trends so our CSMs and Sales reps know exactly what they need to act on. They also know that automated playbooks are triggered from other parts of the Pendo platform (Guides, Orchestrate) to make account engagement more scalable, saving them time.”
The process looks something like this:
- Alert: The CSM receives a Slack or email alert to flag a potentially churn risk
- Context: The CSMs head to Salesforce and see the drivers behind the prediction—for example, low product engagement, low feature adoption.
- Action: The CSM consults the clear next steps, visible in an embedded guide. For example:
- Step 1: Check if the champion has left.
- Step 2: Identify a new power user with strong engagement or positive NPS.
- Step 3: Rebuild the relationship and advocate from there.
This workflow doesn’t just streamline the process, it shifts the mindset. “We’re not reacting to churn notices that take us by surprise, and then scrambling to figure out why and how to try to save the customer,” said Raghavan. “We’re spotting signs very early. We now measure risk for accounts renewing up to 6 months out, so we can take action that helps us change the outcome and minimize firefighting.”
From gut-feel to data-driven
The goal wasn’t just to detect churn. It was to move fast and move together. With Pendo Predict, success isn’t a solo effort. CSMs lead the charge, but renewal managers or account executives can jump in when senior-level engagement is needed.
And because the data is grounded in actual product usage and visible to everyone, it’s trusted. “Building reliable predictions is hard,” Raghavan noted. “But getting your team to trust them, and know what to do next—that’s the real challenge. Pendo Predict solves both.”
This confidence has translated into adoption. Customer success, renewals, and sales teams all use Pendo Predict today, and each team knows its role in responding to signals.
Scaling impact through automation
What’s next: We’re working on new capabilities within Pendo Predict so that a Sales rep can add users into certain Orchestrate campaigns directly from Salesforce - for example, offering a customer who’s visibly struggling with adoption of certain features to join a bootcamp program. This means low-risk accounts can be handled through automation set up directly from Pendo Predict so our humans can shift their focus where it’s most needed instead to save and grow revenue.
The team is already thinking ahead, and starting implementation of Pendo Predict to also get ahead of upsell opportunities - another key pillar for our CSMs.
Turning prediction into growth
The biggest shift isn’t just operational - it’s cultural. With the right signals and workflows in place, Raghavan’s team has moved from “gut feel” to scalable, data-driven action. From reactive firefighting to proactive engagement.
“By rooting predictions in our own product usage data and delivering them where our teams work, we’ve turned gut-feels into repeatable, data-driven motions,” she said. “Now our CSMs aren’t just fighting churn - they’re unlocking growth.”
Interested in seeing how Pendo Predict can help you? Schedule a demo.
