Challenges with customer success software

Over the past decade, customer success teams have become an integral part of the go-to-market (GTM) organization—with responsibilities encompassing customer satisfaction, product adoption, retention, and expansion. In fact, a recent report from LinkedIn on job growth across 28 countries found that customer success roles were among the fastest-growing jobs in ~90% of the countries examined. 

Despite the rapid growth of customer success, innovation in customer success software has lagged behind other areas of the go-to-market stack. The NVC team has worked closely with many GTM teams and executives from leading B2B companies. Again and again, we have heard similar frustrations about customer success tooling, among them:

1. While great for the sales organization, CRM software was not built to serve the needs of customer success teams. Traditional CRMs lack the features and ingestion capabilities needed to manage post-sales activities. They also typically require dedicated operations and engineering resources to retrofit and maintain for customer success use cases.
2. To understand customers’ health, companies may also cobble together a number of disparate tools, including spreadsheets and various softwares for project management, support, business intelligence, product usage, and billing. This approach is extremely tedious, manual and does not scale as a business grows as it lacks customer success-specific workflow automation and a central location for customer data. 
3. First-generation customer success platforms are cumbersome, take many months and expensive resources to implement, and are built for a top-down sales motion. 

A new no-code solution

Founded in 2017, Vitally was purpose-built for today’s customer success teams—unifying customer, product, sales, marketing, and finance data to provide a 360º view of customers. The platform includes robust, out-of-the-box integrations that do not require additional resources to deploy or maintain. In contrast to CRMs and other customer success platforms, which can take months to stand up, Vitally’s implementation process takes weeks. Several of their customers even described implementation as easy as “flipping a switch.”

The next-generation GTM stack

Vitally’s powerful, no-code workflow automation builder eliminates manual tasks for customer success managers (CSMs), allowing them to cover up to five times as many accounts and prioritize their most valuable customers. This is a radical improvement over makeshift solutions of spreadsheets and other tools, which lack automation and force customer success teams to hire additional CSMs.

Vitally’s thoughtful, intuitive design also reimagines the customer success experience to maximize productivity and collaboration. First-generation customer success platforms are often described as clunky and counterintuitive. In contrast, Vitally’s customers rave about the ease and sophistication of Vitally’s user experience and the overall flexibility of the platform, which is architected to handle all go-to-market motions, from top-down enterprise sales to product-led growth.

In our conversations with Jamie Davidson, the CEO and Co-Founder of Vitally, it is evident that he has a genuine understanding of the challenges faced by customer success organizations. Prior to Vitally, Jamie was the Co-Founder and Chief Customer Officer at Pathgather. The learnings from his experience shine throughout the Vitally platform, which Jamie built in collaboration with Patrick Vatterott, Vitally’s talented CTO and Co-Founder.

Vitally is the latest in a series of investments by our team into what we believe to be the next-generation GTM stack—including Gong.io¹ for conversational intelligence, Apollo.io for sales intelligence, HubSpot¹ for customer relationship management (Vitally investor), Mindtickle for sales readiness, and Segment for customer data (Vitally customer). 

We’re very proud to partner with Vitally and believe that their platform has the potential to transform how customer success teams approach product adoption, customer satisfaction, retention, and expansion. Vitally’s promise is evident in its rapidly growing customer base, which already includes high-quality companies such as Zapier, Productboard, Deel, ikas, Pleo, and Twilio Segment.

If you’re looking to join a phenomenal, fast-growing team, Vitally is actively hiring! If you’re building a software company in the GTM stack, we’d love to speak with you.