From reactive fixes to a repeatable playbook: Shiftbase's proactive CS story

The challenge before ImpactPilot

Jasper leads Ops at Shiftbase, an HR and scheduling tool for SMB with a strong footprint in gastro and retail. Over six years the company grew to 7,000-8,000 paid accounts across Germany and the Netherlands. Only a few hundred get white-glove CSM attention. The rest move through a conveyor belt: onboard, adopt, succeed, then support and consultation for growth.

At that volume, real proactive CS on every account was never realistic. What existed instead, in Jasper's words, was pretentious proactive.

"It's a very fake proactive, reactive world, actually. The imagination that we can do this reactively in a way that feels nice for the customer, and he feels like he's first, that was always the dream. It's more of the reality now."

Jasper Klos, Head of Ops, Shiftbase

The gap was structural. One support ticket told you nothing. The same issue could resurface weeks later from a different user on the same account, with no system connecting the dots. By the time a decision-maker listed six loose complaints at once, the account was already at risk, and once an HR customer starts shopping for a replacement, they already have one lined up by the time they cancel.

The search for a tool

The trigger wasn't a CS initiative. It was the realization that managing thousands of accounts on instinct and spreadsheets doesn't scale.

The team looked at dedicated CS platforms like Planhat, and at churn tools built purely around risk signals. Both fell short from opposite directions: churn tools gave signals with no methodology, CSPs gave methodology but rebuilt their own email automation, meetings and health tracking, duplicating what already lived in HubSpot and creating a second silo.

That mattered because Shiftbase's real signals live in two places: support conversations in HubSpot, and product usage in their own systems. A separate CSP meant bolting both onto a third tool. ImpactPilot was the only option that extended what they already had instead of replacing it.

Why ImpactPilot

Working with the ImpactPilot team, Shiftbase built a three-phase framework mirroring the customer journey: Onboarding, Adoption, Expansion. The first activity, documenting the customer's own success criteria, mattered most. It sits right at the friction point between sales and delivery: what does this customer need first, and what comes next, scaffolded into clear milestones.

From there the mechanism is simple, deliberately so. A single support ticket is noise. The same issue from multiple people on the same account, over multiple months, is a signal worth acting on. Almost none of Shiftbase's customer problems are unsolvable, Jasper says, as long as the team has the time and actually knows about them. At 7,000 accounts, that used to be near impossible.

Setup stayed close to the existing workflow. Onboarding and implementation specialists kept working in HubSpot, with risk and adoption signals now flagged automatically instead of depending on someone noticing.

The results

One early save is the clearest proof. A usage risk flagged low employee count on an account, right as a support risk fired on the same account for multiple tickets in a short window. Two signals, one root cause: a payroll configuration error. Fixed in thirty minutes.

"You heard it maybe once in the chat. Support moved on. The problem was, in theory, resolved, but the customer never fully configured the other things he was told to do. That question comes back again, plus the user count being off, those were the two risks flagged, and it was fixed within half an hour."

Jasper Klos, Head of Ops, Shiftbase

Churn was already low, under 2 percent, before ImpactPilot, so the team never expected a dramatic drop. What changed was consistency under pressure. Shiftbase sees onboarding demand spike late in the year, which used to stretch the team thin and show up as a churn spike months later. That seasonal spike has since flattened.

"If these pre-spikes in onboarding load happen, the load on the team goes up, which means you're usually losing focus on something else. What we can visibly see in the data is that the churn spiking has flattened, more of a stable annual curve, without the massive spikes."

Jasper Klos, Head of Ops, Shiftbase

The framework also gave Jasper visibility across his own team, seeing who was strong at scoping success criteria but weak at closing expansion, and coaching accordingly. That changed the quality of what the team delivered.

The recommendation

Jasper's advice scales with the team, but the principle doesn't: build so true proactiveness gets easier, tailor to what each customer needs instead of forcing every account through the same motion, and give CSMs freedom within that structure.

Asked if he'd recommend ImpactPilot to other CS leaders, his answer was direct: keep the tech stack minimal, keep silos small, and pick a tool built around a methodology instead of a hundred features. That combination, educating on both the tool and the method, made the difference for Shiftbase.