Now More Than Ever, World-Class Customer Success is a Competitive Advantage: Our Investment in Vitally
By T.J. Rylander, General Partner; Richard Lui, Partner; Jen Shi, Associate
As the macro economy entered a more challenging period in 2022, we at Next47 started to see a key strategic shift across the B2B ecosystem — customer success and retention are no longer secondary priorities to new customer acquisition. Companies’ GTM focus has transitioned away from the growth at all costs model, with further emphasis being placed on improving time to first value for customers, analyzing/forecasting churn accurately, and driving customers’ product usage. Today, every company is hyper focused on reducing churn and improving net retention rate to ensure their success, and much of this responsibility falls onto the customer success (CS) team.
Within CS teams, CS operations initiatives are prioritized in addition to standard account management responsibilities. Greater investments are being made on customer onboarding infrastructure and CS playbooks to help customer success managers (CSMs) drive customer satisfaction. This push in CS ops is generating a wave of advancements in the industry’s best practices that can be enabled and automated by software.
Vitally, a leading customer success software platform, is at the forefront of this ecosystem acceleration. B2B CS teams, including those at Twilio, Segment, Mixpanel, and Productboard rely on Vitally as a single source of truth for several key reasons:
● Powerful CS workflow automation: Vitally offers an extensive set of automation playbooks, not only for internal workflows such as intelligent account assignment to CSMs and customer alerts, but also customer facing experiences such as onboarding playbooks, customer journey check-ins, and retention + upsell plans. These automation capabilities are designed to be highly customizable to suit the needs of different CS teams, maximizing their productivity
● Best-in-class collaborative workspaces and project management: Teams can use Vitally Docs’ workspaces to collaborate and track customer initiatives shared by GTM (customer success, sales, marketing) and product teams. These collaborative workspaces can be templatized and embedded with customer data points e.g. health scores, customer touch points. Teams no longer have to jump between different systems when seeking visibility across projects and can instead focus on accelerating time-to-value for customers
● Flexibility for CS teams with multi-segment businesses: Vitally’s platform excels in supporting enterprise CSMs who serve large customers via a high touch motion as well as midmarket/SMB CSMs who manage a large set of smaller customers through a hybrid high/tech touch motion. This is crucial in enabling CS teams to collaborate on a unified software platform
● Fast and reliable implementation -> faster ROI: During a time where CS teams cannot afford 6–12 months of implementation time when leveling up their tech stack, Vitally made significant investments in some of the industry’s most robust, self-serve API integrations (CRM, data warehouse, product analytics, email, billing etc.) to help CS teams connect the most relevant data onto one platform
It’s no coincidence that Vitally’s product is uniquely positioned for today’s CS teams as the founders, Jamie and Patrick, bring a differentiated perspective on how to solve today’s CS pain points. As the head of CS at one of Vitally’s customers succinctly captured it — “You can see it in the product, the founders are great engineers with CS prowess and they’ve built the product with an engineering mindset.”
Over the past few years, Jamie and Patrick have assembled an exceptional team for the next chapter of growth. It’s not often we see a team pursue an ambitious product vision while maintaining such a high level of operational excellence. At Next47, we believe the most talented teams are able to optimize for learnings per dollar used and Vitally falls squarely into that category. The CS leaders and teams we have been able to introduce to Vitally through our network echo this sentiment, highlighting the thoughtfulness in Vitally’s product and GTM execution. We’re incredibly grateful for the opportunity to lead their Series B and to support them on this journey. If you are interested in joining us, Vitally is hiring across many of their teams!
