If you’ve ever received a text or an email from a brand with a promotion or product recommendation that felt like it spoke directly to you, Attentive may have powered that message.
As a fast-growing, US-based tech company, Attentive creates bespoke shopping experiences between consumers and the brands they love. Sustaining this growth requires increasingly sophisticated workforce insights to guide planning and decision-making across the organization.
Once the company grew past the 1,000-employee mark, the volume, variety, and importance of workforce and recruiting data increased significantly, placing greater demands on the existing analytics processes and tooling. To understand how the team addressed that shift, we spoke with Mike Zarrilli, Attentive’s People Analytics leader and the primary owner of the Crunchr initiative.
Before Crunchr, Attentive’s People Analytics stack relied on four separate tools to answer routine workforce questions: Knoetic for reporting, BigQuery for data warehousing, Tableau for visualization, and Alteryx to combine data sets. The stack functioned, but insights were fragmented. Attentive set out to consolidate these capabilities into a single platform that would serve both analysts and stakeholders across the organization.
It felt like the perfect happy medium: flexibility for us as a people analytics team, and usability for the rest of our stakeholders.”
THE CHALLENGE
Strong questions, fragmented answers
As Attentive scaled, the questions for the People Analytics team became more sophisticated and urgent, and started coming in from across the organization.
Finance and leadership needed trustworthy headcount and workforce signals for planning and decision-making. On their end, People Business Partners needed fast answers for day-to-day support. And as recruiting and talent programs matured, there was a growing demand to connect pre-hire and post-hire data into a coherent view. The underlying infrastructure, however, wasn’t evolving at the same pace.
Core tools offered limited reporting flexibility, which meant the People Analytics team spent a disproportionate amount of time on manual work, custom calculations, and maintaining a makeshift data infrastructure instead of generating insights. While data lived in BigQuery, the team had to rely on Tableau to build visualizations.
Such a setup made it difficult to do even the most standard of calculations. Case in point: tracking rolling 12-month attrition.
“We were building Tableau visualizations to show things like a rolling 12-month attrition rate. We didn’t have the capability to do rolling 12-month attrition in our previous tool, so we built it in Tableau to track trends over time.”
This approach worked, but its limitations surfaced right away in conversations with stakeholders.
“The problem was: we built pretty Tableau visualizations to report on trends, but we couldn’t drill into specific data points. So when people asked, for example, ‘Who were the voluntary attrits in Engineering who left during that period?’, we couldn’t answer it directly.”
Following up quickly using their separate reporting tool could return inconsistent data, leading to a lack of trust in the metrics. Following 4 up more thoroughly from their database required more queries and validation. Each question from stakeholders, therefore, triggered a new cycle of work. And for a team of two, this became a time sink.
THE DECISION
Choosing flexibility and usability
Before the team began evaluating alternatives, they had defined a clear priority: set up a single place for analytics, intuitive and usable enough so teams could self-serve as much as possible. To get there, they had to work past a number of trade-offs and constraints.
One priority was clear: the team needed to create and track more insightful metrics, such as the rolling 12-month attrition, without building custom workarounds each time.
Confidence in how metrics were calculated also mattered, especially as workforce decisions became more visible at the leadership level. Usability was equally important. The new solution had to be intuitive enough for Business Partners and leadership to explore workforce trends and insights independently, without new friction.
And at the same time, the People Analytics team wanted flexibility. Already slowed down by the rigidity of the previous setup, the team wanted the ability to define segments, adjust logics, and create different cuts of data over time, without depending on engineering resources for every change.
On top of these requirements, there were also broader organizational realities. Tool sprawl had become somewhat of a concern, with a clear business need to consolidate the tech stack. This meant that any new solution had to simplify the landscape and not add another layer. And as with any tooling capacities, there was also the “buy vs build” conversation.
The eventual case combined these elements:
- Bringing people and recruiting data into one place
- Supporting more advanced metrics without heavy customization
- Enabling self-serve access for People Business Partners & leaders
- Reducing reliance on data engineering for analytics maintenance
And according to Mike, the team found this balance in Crunchr:
“It felt like the perfect happy medium: flexibility for us as a people analytics team, and usability for the rest of our stakeholders.”
How a small team drives fast implementation
With clarity on what success needed to look like, Attentive moved quickly into implementation. The work was led by a small, empowered group: a People Analytics Lead, People Operations Lead, and Data Analyst. The team knew their data well, had direct access to it, and worked toward a clear internal deadline.
Some complexity was, of course, unavoidable. Extracting clean data from the HRIS required flexibility and close collaboration with the Crunchr team. But the onboarding process remained smooth and focused.
“The Crunchr team were incredibly responsive and helpful, both on the technical side and in helping us think through how we’d want to show things to stakeholders. It was a really smooth implementation process, and we did it pretty quickly—6 weeks to get it stood up.”
From our side, Attentive stood out as an incredible customer to work with. Their data savviness, hands-on approach from the get-go, and clearly defined goals made the implementation and onboarding smooth and efficient. Even when some parts seemed tricky, our close collaboration and alignment kept the implementation moving quickly.
“What made this integration work so well was the team’s data savviness and their hands-on approach with the platform from the start. They were comfortable exploring the data themselves and had the right internal access and permissions to bring in what they needed. With a small, focused team and a clear deadline, that confidence translated into real momentum very quickly.”
Attentive has been an incredible customer to work with. The team has well defined People Analytics goals and a division of responsibilities that made the back-and-forth of an implementation quick and easy.Getting the data out of their source systems proved to be tricky at times, but we aligned on best practices and worked closely to fix any issues. For data that wasn’t exportable, through learning the workflows in their organization we agreed upon business logic to enable more types of analysis in Crunchr.”
What changed day to day
Once Crunchr was live, the most significant shift showed up in how work moved through the People Analytics team. While the team’s mandate remained the same, delivery became simpler and faster:
“Before Crunchr, we were spending a lot of time just getting to baseline metrics. Now we have those. We can switch something from a regular attrition metric to rolling 12-month attrition with a radio button. That eliminates hours upon hours of data engineering work, which we can redeploy in a more impactful way, mainly toward insights for our teams.”
The team has redirected those hours towards higher-value work. With the foundational layer in place, the team can now concentrate on identifying meaningful patterns, clarifying implications, and shaping the story behind the data.
“Stakeholders, whether on the people team or the business side, aren’t usually impressed by information alone. They want the insight behind it, understandably, since a whole lot of data doesn’t mean much by itself. So, freeing up time from the “crunching” part means we can focus on answering key questions: what are the key insights here, what story do we want to tell, and what do we want stakeholders to take away?”
EARLY WINS
Building confidence through real use cases
One of the first priorities for the Attentive team was creating executive dashboards by department, giving leaders direct access to workforce composition, attrition, recruiting, and cost metrics. At the same time, attrition became a key early use case—and the team went beyond just reporting the numbers.
“We built a one-stop shop, an attrition data explorer, so stakeholders could explore attrition across specific dimensions on their own, making the data more timely and actionable. We were able to bring in both the data and the qualitative insights to tell the attrition story.”
That combination of self-serve access and narrative context landed well with the business.
“The feedback from stakeholders has been very positive— especially around usability and access to what people are looking for.”
Enabling self-serve access
Beyond internal efficiency, a key goal of the implementation was enabling broader access to people data across the organization. One of the clearest early signals of success was how quickly stakeholders began engaging directly with the data.
“Having all our data in one place—with drill-down capabilities for our stakeholders—is really impactful. While adoption is still growing, the direction is clear. What I’m projecting is that a lot of my stakeholders can get to the data they need on their own— without me having to go in and do the manipulation for them.”
Looking ahead
With core systems live, Attentive is now going to focus on wrapping up additional integrations, including talent acquisition and compensation, all the while driving adoption across the organization.
By mid-year, the goal is to have all relevant workforce data in a single place, fully integrated and ready to use. And by year-end, success will be measured by how regularly leaders and stakeholders use that data, not just to access metrics, but to drive accountability and track progress against targets.
“My hope is that people who previously wouldn’t have been able to access workforce information are regularly using it and seeing value in the stories we’re creating.”
For Attentive, Crunchr represents a foundational step: consolidating fragmented tools into a single, flexible platform that enables faster answers, stronger insight delivery, and a more strategic role for the People Analytics team as the company continues to grow.
