How Community Boost cut voluntary turnover by 19% and rebuilt its onboarding experience in weeks

Shannon used Rippling’s deep well of automations and third-party integrations to eliminate ops drag—freeing her from the tactical grind and giving her time back to build career ladders, manager playbooks, and a stronger culture to keep top performers.

With Gusto, payroll used to be a three or four day process. With Rippling, she wraps it up in under a day. New hire employment verification used to face long delays, which opened the agency to compliance risks. Now, it’s done before an employee’s first day. 

With Rippling, there are no more months-long, drawn-out onboarding processes. Now, Shannon gets new hires up and running 12 times faster and puts device management on autopilot. That means new strategists and creatives can join project teams on day one, not day 21—keeping delivery smooth and clients happy. 

Rippling also integrates with all the tools in Community Boost’s tech stack, including its benefits and 401(k) providers—allowing Shannon to handle each process four times faster. “We know now that we have one clean source of data,” she said. “We feed from Rippling into every other system that we use, so there are never any data integrity issues.”

The result of all this freed up time? Shannon can focus on opening up 360-degree feedback loops, upskilling managers, and creating new career development pathways. “I’m able to sit down and take the time to come up with really robust, dynamic trainings. Before I was so bogged down in being a tactician every day that I didn’t have space or time to dive into strategic initiatives,” Shannon said. “If you could hear the state of affairs before we were on Rippling to what it’s like now, it’s a great case study in how to eliminate so much of that tactical work.” 

The strategizing paid off. Post Rippling, engagement is up and voluntary turnover is down 19 percentage points.

Whenever Community Boost ran an engagement survey, the lowest-scoring question used to always be about employees understanding how the company determines compensation. That’s mostly because the agency did its comp planning manually, out of spreadsheets. The leadership team wanted a 10-point improvement in that question. 

With Rippling’s compensation bands tool, Community Boost got a 16-point improvement—all while making the once hours-long endeavor fully automated. In the competitive agency talent market, where recruiters are constantly poaching specialists and managers, clarity around pay bands helps prevent churn.

“Now our client leads and team managers can instantly pull pay band reports and submit raise requests with clear guidelines. It’s helped us increase transparency and improve retention,” Shannon said. She added that the Rippling tool empowers managers to better understand pay ranges and gives employees more transparency into what kind of compensation they can expect along their career path. 

For advertising agencies operating on tight margins and headcount plans, clear and automated comp workflows keep decisions fast — and defensible.

When you’re in client delivery mode, you don’t have time to wait three days for a support ticket. Shannon appreciated that Rippling moved as fast as her team.

Community Boost had had a hard time getting quick, personalized support from Gusto. And after years of using different HR solutions across different, smaller-sized agencies, Shannon wasn’t exactly used to white glove customer service. 

“With Rippling, we get real answers—fast. It feels like we matter,” Shannon said. She loves that she can immediately hop on a chat or call with an expert whenever she runs into issues. 

Shannon also appreciated speaking to a Rippling VP of Product at a Rippling U Live event. “When you're in a Paychex, PeopleSoft, or ADP, you’re scratching tooth and nail for customer service if you’re not a big enterprise keeping their lights on. It’s exhausting and extremely frustrating,” Shannon said. “Rippling’s VP of Product sat down with me, a tiny little client, for an hour and listened to what I thought could be better about the system. That was just awesome.”

Shannon also said Rippling helps Community Boost develop its leaders in the fast-paced, client-first world of agency life. 

“Rippling has really empowered our managers to have workflows and data at their fingertips to stay on target with their KPIs,” she said, adding that the system automatically reminds supervisors to approve time cards and expenses—critical in a billable-hour environment where every delay impacts margin and delivery timelines.

For managers balancing team oversight with client deadlines, campaign launches, and performance reporting, these nudges help them stay on top of admin without dropping the ball.

Rippling also gives employees the ability to self-serve—whether they’re requesting leave, updating their address, or pulling tax documents—without needing to go through HR.

“We’ve enabled the team to operate more self-sufficiently,” Shannon said. That autonomy matters when your team is heads-down on client work and needs answers now, not later.