Building Heartcount – an employee engagement platform with a response rate of over 60%

The challenge: Boosting employee satisfaction and reducing the turnover rate

Heartcount aimed to develop a platform that addressed the common challenges employers face, including high turnover rates, low employee engagement, and the lack of real-time insights.

They wanted to create a comprehensive, data-powered, and cloud-based application that would be accessible to both the company management and employees via their preferred devices.

Vega IT has been Heartcount’s tech partner for four years. We’ve worked on the project from the very beginning and have been involved in all stages of the platform’s development.

The team: A dedicated team of expert software engineers

The client didn’t have an in-house software development team. They were looking for software engineering partners who would understand their requirements and create a custom-made digital product that meets them.

We assembled a dedicated team comprising software developers and a product owner. We were fully involved in all project stages and actively participated in decision-making.

The solution: A data-driven app created with employees in mind

We created a highly user-friendly platform that complies with the highest security standards. The login process is completed via tokens and credentials, as well as two-factor authentication.

Targeting international organizations, the application is available in 12 different languages – English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Hungarian, Macedonian, Portuguese, Serbian, Montenegrin, and Bosnian.

The application works tightly but independently for each of the two groups of users – employees and management.

Heartcount for employees

Employees automatically receive a brief survey every Friday using the integration with third-party service providers Postmark and Twilio. The survey relies on conditional HTML for detecting the used email client. It can be delivered via email, SMS, or Slack, depending on the client's preferred way of communication within the company.

After submitting their answers, the users are redirected to the single-page application to see how they and all other teams in their organization answered the survey. They can also take additional actions, such as writing messages to the management or praising colleagues.

Heartcount for the company’s management

For the company’s management, we created a separate app – Portal. Here, managers can see the employee information that the app has collected, including survey summaries, survey comments, team statistics, individual statistics, messages, praises, and many more.

With the People to keep an eye on functionality, employers can get an instant overview of all employees who have been dissatisfied for a long period of time. That way, they can pay attention to these individuals in a timely manner, reducing the risk of employee turnover.

Through the Heartcount Portal, the company management can register employees who will receive weekly surveys, organize employees into teams, and receive various email notifications as well as in-app notifications.

The results: Reaching 20,000 users across the globe

The first company that had a chance to give Heartcount a ride was no one other than us at Vega IT.

Within a few months, we managed to lower the turnover rate from 27% to as low as 7%, retaining our top talents and improving their job satisfaction levels. This helped us retain our top employees and significantly improved overall job satisfaction. We continue to use it to get deeper insights into our employees’ engagement.

Today, Heartcount has over 20,000 users worldwide, across various industries. IT. Retail. Manufacturing. Banking and finance. Betting and gambling. Marketing and advertising. eCommerce. Just to name a few.

And, its results speak for themselves. The overall response rate for all clients is above 60%. One of their clients saved $200,000 in operational hiring costs in less than a year. Given that, it is not surprising that Heartcount is repeatedly featured in the New York Times as a cost-effective solution for employee engagement surveys.

The full tech stack

The front end:

• Angular
• HTML
• CSS

The back end:

• Node.js with the Express framework
• Sequelize ORM

The server side:

• AWS

Third-party service providers:

• Postmark
• Infobip