“I 100% think Vitally helps with the productivity of my [Customer Success] team.”

Who is Passbase?

Jide Adebayo, Director of Customer Success @ Passbase

Company Bio

Passbase is a digital identity management software hosting a suite of customizable identification tools, including liveness detection, document verification, facial recognition, and more. Serving over 220 customers, including Ramp, Quidd, and Z League, Passbase’s collection of tools verify an end user's true identity and ensures company protection. 

Check out the Passbase Customer Story

In Pursuit of Customer Data Transparency: The Challenges

• Disparate customer data sources made it difficult to find accurate data quickly.  
• Lacking a concrete segmentation strategy was hard for the CS team to understand which customers needed more attention than others. 
• Difficulty monitoring product usage and other customer data. 

Passbase was using an extensive tech stack prior to Vitally, and they were looking for a solution that could centralize their customer data to help them better understand their customers. 

“At Passbase, we were not using a Customer Success Platform (CSP). We were using a lot of different disparate tools that kind of broach the edge of Customer Success, but weren't necessarily built with Customer Success in mind,” says Jide.

Using a CRM as their Customer Success team’s main tool, it didn’t solve the issue of disparate customer data, and the team was piecing together relevant data in hopes of gaining a better viewpoint of the customer. 

“Before we came across Vitally, our customer data was definitely disparate,” says Jide. “The main CRM that we were using was Hubspot, but Hubspot is more, at least the way that we were utilizing it, of a pre-sales tool helping with deals and things of that nature. We also had customer data spread across Mixpanel as well as our own databases.” 

In addition to the disparate state of their tech stack and customer data sources, they were looking for the best ways to help segment their customer base across their team. 

“With our team being less than 30 people, we cannot be hands-on with every customer,” says Jide. “We were really struggling with how to not only segment our customer base but also segment our approach. There are certain customers who are more enterprise that we want to definitely have a more hands-on approach with, and then there are certain customers who don't need that white glove experience; they just need to know how the tool works, maybe some guided content and have a much more tech-touch approach. But before Vitally, there was no way for us to do that.” 

In the midst of developing a segmentation strategy, a direct pain point from lacking segmentation was not having a process for prioritization, such as for support tickets. 

“The one thing that's very good about segmentation, as well as being able to track things like Health Score, is that it helps and it eases the process of prioritization,” says Jide. “So prioritization was definitely one of the key challenges that we had because, let's say, if a customer ticket or an email comes in, there was no kind of contextual account information that would help our team. There was no sense of priority and urgency, and that is something we definitely wanted to bake into our implementation.”

It became a goal to find a tool for Jide’s Customer Success team that could provide the much-needed transparency of their customers and product usage.

“Before we found Vitally, definitely having some type of transparency between ourselves as a company and the customers that we service was definitely a challenge,” says Jide. “It was definitely hard for us to understand the more broadly speaking perspective that our customers held for us and our product, but it was also difficult to understand how our customers were leveraging and using our product.” From “knowing how often [the customer is] logging in to how often are they corresponding with us, those type of things, both from small and big, it was definitely hard for us to keep track of and use that as a way to influence how we dealt with our customers.”

Purpose-Built Customer Success Tool: The Solution

• Creating a centralized location and data source for all customer data. 
• Ability to assign tasks and input notes for different customer accounts to help Customer Success Managers stay up-to-date with the latest customer information.
• Automating tasks and indicators to keep the Customer Success team proactive against risks, like churn. 

There were several boxes that needed to be checked when Passbase began searching for the right Customer Success Platform for their team. 

When searching for a Customer Success tool, “price point was important. Also having a centralized toolset for anything relevant to the customer along with the flexibility and configuration of the tool were important,” says Jide. “The other important aspect was having a tool that could blend with our existing tech stack. We had Hubspot, we had our own databases, we leveraged SAP a lot, Stripe, Zapier, and Vitally easily plugged into all of those, which made it a very easy implementation process.”

Once Vitally was quickly configured with their current tech stack, the ease of setting up health scores and utilizing Vitally's playbooks quickly stood out to the team.

“For me personally,” says Jide, “the UI is definitely something that I think is very sleek and easy to learn and acclimate to. The flexibility and the configuration [was the same]. One thing that I also like, and know a lot of team members under me think as well, is the playbooks, the ease of setting up health scores within the system, and leveraging [those features] to create customized and focus dashboards that bring those important key metrics to the surface.”

The first feature Passbase established right away and set out to maximize was the Customer Health Score feature in Vitally. 

“We have a number of traits that indicate a customer's health with Passbase that are based on a number of categories, and the CSMs that are in the tool look at that daily,” says Jide. “Another feature we definitely leverage is the playbooks. Having a number of playbooks that are either meant for internal workflows, so a CSM tagging an account or following up with an account, or making some notes based on that account activity and how they're moving across that health score.” 

Understanding the health of a customer with Vitally was a huge win for Passbase, allowing them to pinpoint churn risk better. 

When it comes to customer churn and tracking, “Vitally plays a key role, from the beginning [and onward],” says Jide. “If that customer is [showing] good health and then those health signals start to show that there is a risk for churn…we have some indicators set up Vitally to move that customer out of the revenue that's recognized.”

Once Playbook triggers are activated for customers at risk for churn, the Passbase Customer Success team also utilizes tasks and automation to help standardize the process. 

“We also have some tasks that are automated to make sure that the CSM who is responsible for that churned account, for instance, performing an exit interview, collecting that information, and storing it in Vitally,” says Jide. “If you are in the Customer Success world, there are always opportunities for customers to come back even if they do churn. So having that historical context and data in Vitally for either the same CSM to pick up or for a new CSM to pick up is important.”

To better optimize the customer journey, the Passbase team utilizes the milestones feature to better track account progress and goals. 

“There are also some “external playbooks [at play],” says Jide. “When our accounts reach a certain milestone or perform a certain activity, we have automated emails that are sent out and being able to draw that customer journey within a workflow environment which is very important and, personally, I think it’s also pretty fun.” 

The Customer Success team isn’t the only team that is benefiting from Vitally. 

“One member from each department at Passbase has access to Vitally so they can see some of the standalone dashboards - overall customer health and performance,” says Jide. Specifically, “our product and engineering team benefits from Vitally, particularly from the NPS surveys. [We have an] NPS tool integrated into the platform, plus we have a playbook to set up when that NPS is sent, and our product team looks at what those ratings and any qualitative feedback that customers might give after taking the survey.”

Vitally is strongly intertwined with CSM OKRs at Passbase, and they’re using the tool in unique ways to achieve new levels of success and engagement.

“For our CSMs, a lot of their OKRs are tied to certain feature sets that we're trying to push and make sure that we're optimizing [in Vitally],” says Jide. “Playbook[s] give us a tangible and numerical way to measure engagement across campaigns because we can see how many people make it through the whole playbook. We can see where they drop off, we can see what pieces of content receive the most engagement, and that can be directly correlated not only to the OKRs but the goals of some of the CSMs that are using the tool here at Passbase.” 

Why Passbase Recommends Vitally to Other Customer Success Teams

• A centralized toolset for the Customer Success team.
• Flexibility and ease of platform configuration. 
• Improved overall team productivity. 

The Customer Success team at Passbase has experienced positive change since implementing Vitally, especially their productivity.

“I 100% think Vitally helps with the productivity of my team,” says Jide. “I will definitely say my team spends most of the day in Vitally. Verification volume is extremely important to us, and a lot of that product data is fed directly into Vitally…[and] having that tool and mechanism to facilitate how we engage with our customers daily is something we use day in and day out.”

Vitally keeps the Passbase Customer Success team organized and on track to exceed organizational goals. 

“Ever since we've implemented Vitally, I've added more and more people to my team, and I definitely think our team feels a lot more organized and [has a] sense of direction without having me directly involved,” says Jide. “Vitally has our playbooks set up, and we have certain risk indicators or opportunity indicators that run on their own, which in turn tells [our CSMs] where their prioritization should be. For the most part, Vitally helps our team run a lot more autonomously.”

The flexibility provided by Vitally received major kudos from the Passbase team. 

“Vitally has helped us because it's such a flexible tool, it's helped us pull data that I necessarily can't get directly from our product, but it's helped me do it in a more roundabout way that still allows for my team to be productive.” Overall, “Vitally offers more than we had anticipated, and I [am] excited to leverage the tool more.” 

Does Passbase recommend Vitally? The short answer is yes!

“Yes, I will definitely recommend Vitally to any of my peers, especially for CS teams that are being built from the ground up,” says Jide. “It’s been easy for me to align my vision for my team and for Passbase with the implementation and progress we have made in Vitally. I definitely would recommend it to anybody who's trying to build their CS department and CS strategy.” 

See how CS teams use Vitally for their data-driven decision-making and how they exceed their customers' expectations and goals. Get an inside look at the Vitally platform with a free trial when you schedule a demo today.