Case Study
Jared Zhao
CEO
PhoneBurner cuts retention analysis time by 99% and unlocks actionable behavioral insights with Athenic AI’s automated cohort analytics platform.
PhoneBurner is a leading cloud-based sales engagement platform that helps sales teams increase productivity, streamline outreach, and close more deals. Trusted by thousands of professionals, the platform supports fast, compliant, and scalable communication.
As PhoneBurner scaled, growth required a clearer understanding of customer retention and lifetime value (LTV). With complex data and limited analyst resources, the team struggled to surface the behavioral insights they needed. That changed when they partnered with Athenic AI.
Industry: SaaS / Sales Enablement
Location: Laguna Beach, California
Customers: Thousands of sales teams and professionals across industries
PhoneBurner’s growth strategy hinges on increasing customer lifetime value (LTV), but the team lacked clarity on which customer behaviors and traits drove long-term retention. Key questions remained unanswered:
How does retention change after Salesforce integration?
How does retention differ for customers who integrate Salesforce vs. HubSpot?
What’s the impact of ARMOR feature usage?
Do customers importing 500 vs. 5,000 contacts behave differently over time?
What customer acquisition cost is justified for different segments?
Prior to Athenic AI, attempts to manually analyze cohort retention were time-consuming and inefficient—taking up to 4 hours for a single chart.
Without fast access to insights, product and acquisition decisions were based on gut, not data.
PhoneBurner implemented Athenic AI to automate and scale its cohort retention analysis across dozens of customer segments. The platform uses natural language and AI-powered query tools to uncover retention drivers in seconds, with no manual analysis required.
Using Athenic AI, the team was able to:
Automate cohort retention analysis for all priority segments
Identify behaviors linked to long-term retention
Build a repeatable analytics framework
Share insights directly with product and acquisition teams to guide strategy
“Before Athenic AI, our customer analysis was a tangle of static reports and guesswork. Now, I can instantly slice our cohorts by payment plan type, onboarding experience, or feature usage—and understand differences in engagement and LTV. It’s completely transforming how we prioritize our roadmap and uncover high-LTV segments. Athenic AI lets us build with clarity, not assumptions.”
Rachel Hechter, Head of Product at
PhoneBurner
Athenic AI connected to PhoneBurner’s existing data stack with minimal setup and no technical lift required. The first successful cohort retention analysis was completed within minutes of data connection, a clear improvement over the previous 4-hour manual process.
With Athenic AI, PhoneBurner’s product team was able to explore customer segments in greater depth, uncover key retention patterns, and align internal engineering and marketing efforts around shared, actionable insights.
PhoneBurner moved from slow, manual analysis to fast, strategic decision-making:
99% faster analysis — from 4 hours to under 30 seconds
Deeper behavioral insights — linked features like ARMOR and Salesforce to retention
Smarter acquisition decisions — based on real cohort data
Product roadmap alignment — focused on features that drive long-term value
Cross-team visibility — benchmarks shared across product, growth, and GTM teams
This shift gave PhoneBurner clear visibility into what actually drives customer value and retention. Insights are now guiding product development, marketing strategy, and customer success investments.
“We’re finally getting clear visibility into which customer behaviors actually drive long-term retention. It’s a big step forward that will help us focus our product, marketing, and success efforts where they’ll have the most impact.”
Charles Michael, Senior Product Manager at
PhoneBurner
Within three months, Athenic AI enabled PhoneBurner to build a scalable retention analytics engine that teams across the company can rely on. The product and growth organizations are now aligned around trusted benchmarks, regularly exploring new segments and shaping strategy with confidence grounded in data rather than assumptions.
