Who is Klaus?

Martin Kõiva, Co-Founder & CEO @ Klaus‍

Klaus is a B2B conversation review and QA platform that helps support teams at Epic Games, Soundcloud, PandaDoc, HotJar, Wistia, and beyond, support quality conversation with reviews. Klaus measurably improves customer service quality by making internal feedback easy and systematic.

Check out Klaus's customer story ->

Using a Shoe As a Hammer: The Challenges

• Experienced a lack of control within their customer base
• Had no systematic way of finding out how each customer was doing
• Had to make do with a slew of back office tools that were not designed for CS
  

Before implementing Vitally, Klaus’s CEO and Customer Success team went from using a spreadsheet to manage their customer success processes to a CRM to an alternate CS platform. And while they were useful in the interim, none of these tools were giving the CS team at Klaus the one thing they needed—a sense of control over what was going on within their customer base. 

“In the beginning you have two customers and you don't need a tool, and then all of a sudden you have five, and then you have 10, and then you have 20, and then you find yourself feeling that anxiety, and I think it's normal as you grow,” said Martin. “There's no clear moment like this is the right time for [a CS platform], but certainly you get to a point where the entire team is feeling like they are not in control of what is happening.”

While Klaus loves using Pipedrive CRM for their sales team, it was no secret that it was not built for Customer Success. That’s what led the CS team at Klaus to try out another Customer Success platform—however that tool was no Goldilocks situation either.

‍“What we ran into there was that the customer experience with that tool, for us, was not very good,” said Martin. “So we basically went from no system to spreadsheets to another tool, which didn't work out very well because of the customer experience, to Vitally.”

Purpose-built Customer Success Platform: The Solution

• Because Vitally is built for the Customer Success use case, every feature and integration works toward that
• Executives can easily access and filter through customer data to get a 360-view ad hoc 
• Overall relief from the overwhelming feeling that the CS team was going to drop the ball without realizing
  

For Martin, the phrase that comes to mind when describing Vitally is ‘purpose-built’. From the suite of integrations to the UI, Vitally is built to serve the needs of world-class Customer Success teams.

“Every little detail that you see in the UI, like, there's no wasted space there. Everything is well thought out, and it's built for serving the purpose of this customer success use case as opposed to some kind of general tool,” said Martin. “You know, it's always nice to use something that is dedicated for the task at hand as opposed to using, like, I don't know, your shoe as a hammer, which you can do, but it's not the same.”

Vitally’s Intercom and Segment integrations are key for the CS team at Klaus, empowering them with meaningful insights into the conversations that are happening with customers across multiple channels, including engagement and usage information. 

“Lots of other tools have the same integrations, but it's the purpose,” said Martin. “[Vitally integrations] are serving the job that needs to be done very directly… as opposed to just trying to make something up and like creating your own systems, or having somebody hack things together.”

While both the Customer Success team and executives at Klaus use segmentation within Vitally to monitor their portfolio of customers, Martin, Klaus’s CEO, leverages the segmentation feature to see the bigger picture in one view e.g. how many customers are in the at-risk segment. 

“Any company will have different ways that they want to slice and dice their customer base. It’s very easy to do so in Vitally,” said Martin. “Within those segments, you can also sort from healthiest to least healthy, or highest MRR to lowest MRR, and it goes back to the fact that [Vitally] is purpose-built for this.”

As for the Customer Success Managers at Klaus, they’ve regained a sense of control since starting with Vitally. 

“It has gone from, ‘I wonder if I'm forgetting something really important and now our customer is going to churn’ to ‘One click and I have the entire picture’,” said Martin. “It's this overwhelming feeling of relief. It's very easy to get to the bottom of things and not have to worry about, like, maybe there's this one email somewhere that I forgot to answer and now something horrible is going to happen.”

Beyond the CS team and the C-Suite, other departments that are interested in how their customers are doing e.g. product management, customer solutions, engineering, marketing, and beyond, have insight into their customer base. 

“If marketing wants to do a case study with a customer, they want to make sure that they're not approaching somebody that is experiencing some kind of issue, and basically asking them for favors. So, instead of going to the Customer Success Manager, they can first check Vitally,” said Martin. “If their health score is good and there's healthy communication happening, then it’s  probably a good indication that they can approach the customer. So it has removed quite a bit of friction and useless back and forth within the team as well.”

Ultimately, the value Klaus has experienced from Vitally has come in the form of increased expansion MRR, faster customer onboardings, and improved NPS scores.

“There's no question about it that [Vitally] has played an important role in increasing our expansion MRR that we have gotten from customers, because it's one of the most important changes that we've made to our Customer Success toolset, and how we do things...” said Martin. “There’s definitely a correlation between how we have been able to onboard new customers… and our NPS scores are also at an all time high. So you know, the fact that we have been able to stay on top of our customers and those relationships is thanks to Vitally.”

Why Klaus Recommends Vitally to Other Customer Success Teams (on a Regular Basis)

• The only CS tool built for rapidly growing companies with modern tech-stacks 
• No matter what, whether you’re using all of the functionality or not, companies will benefit from Vitally
• Free trial to prove out time to value

From Klaus’s perspective, Vitally is the only Customer Success tool built for companies like theirs—growing rapidly and using all the modern tools. Because of this, Vitally is on Martin’s short list of tools that he recommends on a regular basis.

“When it comes to Customer Success tools, well, I can't really name any other ones that are worth mentioning. I would be hard pressed to name any modern Customer Success tools built for this type of company. When I say this type of company, like, a new economy company that is growing rapidly, using all the modern tools,” said Martin. “I really don't know if there are any viable competitors out there.”

Vitally has a lot of functionality, but, according to Klaus, your CS team doesn’t need to use all of it to benefit from the platform.

“I know for a fact that we don't use all of it. And that's totally fine… There are different things that will be important for different customers,” said Martin. “I think it's unlikely that a customer wouldn't find something that is extremely useful for their Customer Success team in [Vitally’s platform].”

See Vitally in action today >

When it comes to building out a world-class Customer Success organization for the first time, Vitally is the first and last CS platform you’ll ever need. From enabling you to straighten out data and process issues to getting up and running without operational support, Vitally is the Customer Success platform that’s built for the new generation of B2B SaaS.