How Global Talent Solutions Doubled Customer Retention by Reconstructing Keap Activity Timelines

Client Overview

Global Talent Solutions (GTS) is a rapidly growing B2B SaaS company specializing in AI-powered recruitment software. With a client base exceeding 1,500 enterprises, GTS offers sophisticated tools for candidate sourcing, screening, and onboarding. Their platform is critical for HR departments and recruiting agencies aiming to streamline their talent acquisition processes. GTS had achieved significant market penetration and a strong revenue trajectory, yet they faced increasing operational complexity. Their sales, customer success, and technical support teams each leveraged specialized tools, but a unified view of customer interactions remained elusive. While Keap served as their central CRM for managing client relationships and automating marketing communications, its activity timelines were notoriously incomplete, creating blind spots that directly impacted their ability to proactively support and retain customers.

The company, operating with a lean but highly effective team, recognized that continued growth hinged not just on acquiring new clients, but on maximizing the lifetime value of existing ones. This meant ensuring every client interaction, from a support ticket to a sales call or a marketing email click, was logged, accessible, and actionable. Without this holistic view, their strategic account management efforts were reactive, and opportunities for upselling or cross-selling were often missed due to a lack of comprehensive client intelligence.

The Challenge

GTS’s primary challenge stemmed from a fragmented data ecosystem. While Keap was designated as the “source of truth,” the reality was far from it. Customer interactions were scattered across an array of platforms: support tickets in Zendesk, sales notes in a legacy CRM, marketing engagement data in various email and analytics tools, and project management updates in Asana. Each of these systems held crucial pieces of the customer journey, but they operated in isolated silos. Keap’s native activity timeline only captured a fraction of this vital information – primarily direct email communications or manually logged calls. This meant that when a customer success manager reviewed a client’s Keap record, they saw an incomplete picture, making it difficult to understand the full context of recent interactions, ongoing issues, or potential churn signals.

This data fragmentation led to several critical problems. Customer support agents often lacked visibility into recent sales conversations or marketing campaigns, leading to disjointed customer experiences. Sales teams couldn’t see open support tickets or product usage issues before reaching out, resulting in awkward and often counterproductive calls. Most importantly, GTS struggled with proactive customer retention. Without a real-time, comprehensive view of client engagement and potential dissatisfaction, identifying at-risk accounts was a manual, often delayed process. This reactive approach meant that by the time an account was flagged for churn, it was often too late to intervene effectively. The lack of an unbroken activity timeline in Keap was a significant bottleneck, impacting team efficiency, client satisfaction, and ultimately, customer retention rates.

Our Solution

4Spot Consulting engaged Global Talent Solutions with our proprietary OpsMap™ diagnostic framework to thoroughly audit their existing operational workflows and identify critical data gaps. Our deep dive quickly confirmed that the disconnected nature of their customer interaction data, particularly its absence from Keap’s activity timelines, was the root cause of their retention challenges. We proposed an OpsBuild™ initiative centered on creating a robust, automated integration layer designed to centralize all customer touchpoints into a unified “single source of truth” within Keap.

Our solution focused on leveraging Make.com (formerly Integromat) as the central nervous system for data orchestration. This powerful low-code automation platform allowed us to build custom scenarios that would pull interaction data from GTS’s disparate systems and systematically feed it into the corresponding client records within Keap. The core objective was to reconstruct a complete and accurate activity timeline for every client, ensuring that Keap reflected every significant touchpoint, regardless of its origin. This wasn’t merely about syncing data; it was about intelligently mapping diverse data types – support ticket status, sales meeting notes, product usage alerts, marketing campaign engagement, and billing updates – into a consistent, chronological narrative within Keap. By doing so, we aimed to transform Keap from a partial record-keeper into a dynamic, real-time repository of the entire customer journey, accessible and actionable by all relevant teams.

Implementation Steps

The implementation phase was structured methodically to ensure comprehensive integration and minimal disruption to GTS’s operations:

1. Data Source Identification & Mapping: We began by meticulously identifying all critical customer interaction points across GTS’s tech stack. This included Zendesk for support, a proprietary sales enablement tool, Mailchimp for marketing emails, and a custom-built product usage analytics platform. For each source, we mapped relevant data fields (e.g., ticket ID, status, last update; sales call date, summary, next steps; email open/click rates; product feature usage spikes) to corresponding fields and activity types within Keap.
2. Make.com Scenario Development: Our team then designed and built a series of complex automation scenarios within Make.com. These scenarios were engineered to:
   • Zendesk Integration: Automatically create new Keap notes/tasks for new support tickets, update existing Keap activities when ticket statuses changed (e.g., solved, pending), and log all key interactions (public replies, internal notes) directly into the client’s Keap activity timeline.
   • Sales Tool Synchronization: Extract meeting notes, call summaries, and proposal statuses from the sales enablement tool and push them into Keap as custom activities, ensuring account managers had full visibility into recent sales engagements.
   • Marketing Engagement Tracking: Integrate Mailchimp to log email opens, clicks, and campaign subscriptions as Keap activities, providing a holistic view of a client’s marketing journey.
   • Product Usage Alerts: Set up triggers from the product analytics platform to create Keap activities for significant usage changes – both positive (e.g., adoption of a new feature) and negative (e.g., a drop in active users), enabling proactive intervention.
   • Data De-duplication & Normalization: Built in logic to prevent duplicate entries and ensure data consistency across all integrated platforms, maintaining data integrity within Keap.
3. Phased Rollout & Testing: The integrations were deployed in a phased manner, starting with smaller pilot groups and individual data sources. Rigorous testing was conducted at each stage to validate data flow, accuracy, and adherence to business rules. This included end-to-end testing of each scenario, verifying that activities appeared correctly and completely within Keap’s timelines.
4. Team Training & Documentation: We provided comprehensive training to GTS’s sales, customer success, and support teams on how to effectively utilize the newly enriched Keap activity timelines. This included best practices for interpreting the consolidated data, identifying critical touchpoints, and leveraging the complete history for improved client engagement. Detailed documentation was also provided to ensure long-term sustainability and easy troubleshooting.
5. Ongoing Optimization (OpsCare™): Post-implementation, 4Spot Consulting continued to provide OpsCare™ support, monitoring the automation health, identifying opportunities for further refinement, and adapting the integrations as GTS’s tech stack evolved. This included regular reviews of data accuracy and system performance.

The Results

The implementation of 4Spot Consulting’s solution delivered transformative results for Global Talent Solutions, directly addressing their retention challenges and significantly enhancing operational efficiency. By reconstructing comprehensive Keap activity timelines, GTS achieved a clarity in client understanding that was previously unattainable, leading to measurable improvements across key performance indicators:

• Doubled Customer Retention: Within 12 months post-implementation, GTS experienced a remarkable 100% increase in their customer retention rate. This was a direct result of teams having complete, real-time visibility into client health, allowing for proactive interventions and personalized support that prevented churn.
• 25% Reduction in Churn Rate: Correlating with the improved retention, the overall client churn rate decreased by 25%, translating into substantial recurring revenue protection and growth.
• 30% Faster Customer Issue Resolution: With all relevant support tickets, communication history, and product usage data available directly in Keap, support agents could resolve customer issues 30% faster. This improved efficiency was due to reduced time spent context-switching between systems and a clearer understanding of the client’s historical interactions.
• 150+ Hours Saved Per Month in Manual Data Entry: The automation eliminated the need for manual logging of activities from various platforms into Keap. This translated to an estimated saving of over 150 administrative hours per month across sales, customer success, and support teams, freeing up high-value employees to focus on strategic, client-facing activities.
• 20% Increase in Upsell/Cross-sell Opportunities: Sales and account management teams, armed with a complete view of product usage, engagement, and support history, were better equipped to identify and act on upsell and cross-sell opportunities. The integrated data allowed for more targeted and timely pitches, contributing to a 20% increase in expansion revenue.
• Enhanced Client Satisfaction Scores: The consistency and proactivity in client interactions, driven by comprehensive data, led to a noticeable improvement in client satisfaction scores (CSAT and NPS), reinforcing GTS’s reputation as a client-centric organization.

These quantifiable metrics unequivocally demonstrate the profound impact of a unified data strategy, proving that investing in robust automation to reconstruct vital CRM timelines directly translates into superior business outcomes and sustained growth.

Key Takeaways

The success story of Global Talent Solutions offers powerful lessons for any B2B SaaS company grappling with fragmented data and customer retention challenges. The most critical takeaway is that your CRM is only as powerful as the data it contains. An incomplete activity timeline, even in a sophisticated system like Keap, creates significant operational blind spots that directly impact customer satisfaction, team efficiency, and ultimately, your bottom line.

Embracing a strategic approach to data integration, particularly through flexible low-code automation platforms like Make.com, is no longer a luxury but a necessity. By intentionally reconstructing a “single source of truth” within your CRM, you empower every team member with the context they need to deliver exceptional, proactive customer experiences. This leads to higher retention, more efficient operations, and a stronger foundation for scalable growth. The ability to see the full customer journey, from initial contact to ongoing support and product usage, enables businesses to move from reactive problem-solving to proactive value delivery. This shift not only protects existing revenue but also unlocks new opportunities for expansion and strengthens client relationships for the long term.

“Before 4Spot, our Keap timelines were like a puzzle with half the pieces missing. We were making critical customer decisions based on incomplete information. After their intervention, it’s a complete picture – every interaction, every detail, right where we need it. This complete visibility wasn’t just helpful; it was truly transformative. We now operate with a level of confidence and proactivity that has directly impacted our retention rates, exceeding even our most optimistic projections.”

— Sarah Chen, VP of Customer Success, Global Talent Solutions

If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: The Unbroken Keap HR & Recruiting Activity Timeline: Protection & Recovery with CRM-Backup