Who is Getro?

Amelia Mehaffey, Customer Success and Experience Team Lead @ Getro

Getro makes it easy to connect people and companies in your network with a branded job board and private talent network. Over 600 customers—including VC platform teams, chambers of commerce, career centers, and beyond—trust Getro's automated job board and private talent network to take the manual work out of connecting people and companies in their network. 

Check out Getro's Customer Story >

Health Scores the Manual Way: The Challenges

• Cobbling together tools and data
• Needed to keep up with exponential growth
• No scalable way to measure customer health

Before implementing a dedicated Customer Success Platform, the Customer Success team at Getro lived out of their customer support ticketing platform—which was great for managing support tickets, but not so great for the consolidation of all of their customer data. 

“I had always sort of cobbled together whatever tools I could. I had always had a customer ticketing system, but the rest of our data was very scattered across different systems,” said Amelia. “A key reason why I was on the hunt for something like Vitally.”

As Getro’s customer base continued to grow, Getro’s Customer Success team found themselves spending more and more time pulling together data from different systems and aggregating it into a Google spreadsheet.

“With 600 customers, we only had two CSMs who were actively managing those accounts, and then an Experience Representative who helped out with day to day support requests,” said Amelia. “So those three people were every day, you know, looking in these many different systems to find customer data to help us solve problems, communicate better with our customers, and also provide information internally to our team about who our customers were, and what they were asking for.”

One of Getro’s main breaking points that led to investing in a dedicated Customer Success Platform was not having an effective way to measure customer health. While Customer Health Scores are a critical aspect of any CS organization, this is especially true for Getro. 

“We don't do a lot of external marketing for our product, so our growth is heavily reliant on customer referrals and word of mouth. So making sure that our customers are happy and healthy is very important to us,” said Amelia. “We were finding that the aspects of what we consider a healthy customer were so spread out across these different systems that it was difficult for us to manually get all this data together and aggregate those scores.”

Amelia points to times when her CEO or Product team would ask granular questions around Customer Health Scores that her team was unable to answer without spending a lot of time digging through disparate customer data points. 

“‘How are our customers in this segment doing? ‘How are customers who are in this pricing tier doing?’ When those kinds of granular questions started coming up, I realized how much time it was going to take me to really answer those questions,” said Amelia. “That was it for me. That's when I went and said, ‘listen, I need to talk about my department budget because I've got to have a better tool to do this.’”

Customer Success as a Revenue Driver: The Solution

• Product and Sales team benefit from using the platform for customer sentiment and referrals
• Decreased customer setup times, a key Customer Success metric
• Turning Getro’s CS team into a revenue-driving team

Amelia found Vitally after being referred by a tight-knit network of CSMs that she had worked with throughout her career in Customer Success. 

“One of them told me that she had this new tool she was really excited about implementing, and I knew that's exactly what I needed as soon as she was talking about it,” said Amelia. “She was really excited about the implementation process as well as having the support that her team needed during the setup process to be able to get all of their data into Vitally, and it just sounded like an all around great experience.” 

After seeing Vitally for herself, Amelia was even more convinced that Vitally was the perfect tool for her team. 

“I was just blown away with what they could offer me, and then I realized that it could do all these other things as well,” said Amelia. “It was just such a great find. It really came together for us.”

Another huge factor that impacted Getro’s decision to implement Vitally? Accessibility. 

“The startup plan that Vitally offers was such a crucial piece of our decision making… so many tools like this could be so helpful to smaller CS teams, but the price points make them absolutely just a nonstarter,” said Amelia. “You know, small CS teams start to have the same problems as big CS teams way sooner than people think. It gets really hard to manage your customer set once you cross, I'd say, about 200 customers.”

One area where Vitally has made a major impact is in Getro’s comprehensive new customer onboarding process. 

“For new customers, they all get their profile setup in Vitally. Then we have projects for them. That's where we manage the different steps that we take to make sure that our customers' setups go smoothly,” said Amelia. “It's a very detailed and handheld process with us. It takes us. on average, between five and 12-14 days for a customer to go live. So in that two week period, there's so much that needs to happen and Vitally helps us keep track of all of that.

Beyond the steps a customer and their CSM need to take to get them up and running in Getro, Vitally’s platform helps Getro’s Customer Success team keep track of critical context that would otherwise be lost during the sales to CS handoff process.

“All this information is gathered about a customer when they're still a prospect by the sales team in a CRM like HubSpot, where they can keep notes about who the customer is and what they want, et cetera. For us, that valuable context was getting lost before we had Vitally, because we didn't have a good place to keep it,” said Amelia. “We were kind of keeping notes in Freshdesk, some in Asana, things like that, but bringing all of those things together to be able to capture that crucial customer knowledge that can be learned during the setup phase—it was really cool for us to have just a centralized place to store those details.”

Speaking of passing data from a CRM to a Customer Success Platform, Vitally’s integration with Hubspot is another huge value-add for Getro. 

“In terms of the integrations with our existing tech stack, the Hubspot integration is amazing. It's one of the better integrations between products that I've seen,” said Amelia. 

Not only was it great that Getro’s CS team now had a place to centralize all of their customer data and anecdotal information, but now other organizations could easily access that information when needed as well. 

“The major thing that Vitally helped us do is bring all that information into this one place so that it's easily accessible, not just by my CSX team, but also by other members of our team who are observers in our Vitally account,” said Amelia. “They can quickly access that information without having to ask me or ask someone else on our ops team to pull a big report together for them. Now it's literally at our fingertips.”

Beyond other teams being able to access customer information, their ability to actually leverage customer data has a company-wide impact. 

“Having Vitally on board has meant that we can give [our Product team] more impactful feedback. We're able to say, ‘these customers in this segment make up this much of our revenue, and these are the things that they want,’ and give them feedback that really helps them prioritize the roadmap in a way that's a lot easier for them,” said Amelia. “Whereas before, we were just saying, ‘oh, yeah, last week, I heard a couple of people say this...’ It's so much easier to give them all that good data that they want when they're making decisions now.”

It’s not just the Getro Product team that’s benefiting—their sales team also uses Vitally to drive revenue. 

“We don't do a lot of external marketing at Getro, and so, so much of our growth is tied to customer referrals and word of mouth. So when our sales team is looking for someone to reach out to, to be able to give us a referral, or to be able to potentially make an intro to another prospect,” said Amelia. “It's so much easier now for them to either come to us and ask, or go into Vitally themselves as an observer, and do those searches for the people that they want, and see which customers are okay to reach out to right now.”

As for the ROI Getro has seen with Vitally, Amelia reports decreased onboarding times since moving their entire onboarding process to Vitally’s platform. 

“When we brought [Vitally] on toward the beginning of the year, we were floating right above two weeks, and we're steadily ticking down to being closer to a regular average of about eight to 12 days. So that's been really exciting,” said Amelia. “I know that that's coming from Vitally because we moved our entire process into that system, and having the tools at our fingertips to be able to do that process quicker and be able to collaborate better—I know that that's been behind that decrease for sure.”

Getro has also seen an increase in expansion revenue, and an increase in renewals since implementing Vitally. 

“One of my goals that I wanted to achieve in bringing Vitally on was helping my CS team become a revenue driving team, and we are well on track to do that at this point,” said Amelia. “We're seeing an increase in customer renewal deals converting. We're seeing an increase in expansion revenue, and again, that all goes back to having Vitally, and having a place to manage those processes.”

Why Getro Recommends Vitally to Other Customer Success Teams

• The tool itself is fun to use and visually appealing
• Startup partner program
• Sales team wanted to add value, not the hard sell

You could say the Customer Success team at Getro is a fan of Vitally. 

“We're kind of embarrassing fangirls when we talk about how much we love Vitaliy all the time,” said Amelia. “It's not just the way it's given us the ability to organize our work and stuff, but the tool itself is fun to use and is visually pleasing. It's no longer a burden for us to do a task list related to customers. It feels like an exciting thing… I would say it's improved our morale.”

As a Customer Success leader at a startup, Amelia highly recommends implementing a dedicated Customer Success Platform as soon as possible. 

“When you work in a startup, it's all about going fast and iterating and changing things as you go. I find that CS teams can feel hampered in our ability to do that because of the systems that we have available to us,” said Amelia. “Because data tends to be spread out all over the place about your customers, it's hard to move fast when it takes you two hours to pull in a bunch of data about your customers to be able to answer a simple question.”

Why Vitally over other platforms aside from the accessible pricing model for startups, and, well, everything we’ve already touched on above?

“Whenever I approached companies like Gainsight and ChurnZero [in the past], I've gotten the hard sell, which I hate. You know that constant follow up of like, ‘did you make a decision?’” said Amelia. “What I liked in talking to [Vitally] is it just seemed like you were genuinely like, what do you need? How can we support you? Is this right for you? And I really appreciated that. I felt like I was being sold a CS tool by a CS person, by someone who really got it, and wanted to make sure that this was going to be a good fit.”

So, would this Customer Success leader recommend Vitally?

‍“Absolutely. Give me a sign up to stand out on the street corner and wave. I would absolutely recommend vitally to any customer success person that asked or that didn't ask, frankly,” said Amelia.