Who is Pencil?

Chase Mohseni, Customer Success Lead @ Pencil

Pencil is the world's most powerful Creative AI platform that helps leading DTC brands like L’Oreal, Sephora, WizardPins, Lyka, and beyond, generate better, faster, and more affordable ads. With Pencil, brands can connect their store, asset library, and ad account data, and Pencil’s algorithms will generate new ad ideas, give teams transparent insights, and constantly learn from that data to improve your results.

Check out Pencil's Customer Story >>

From Qualitative to Quantitative: The Challenges

• CS team could not communicate efficiently, both internally and externally
• CS felt stuck in the past and ineffective compared to the rest of the organization
• Onboarding new team members was not scalable
  

Before using Vitally, the Customer Success team at Pencil spent too much time sorting through too many disparate customer data points. 

“A huge amount of our data and information was dispersed across multiple Google sheets in different folders handled by a bunch of different people,” said Chase Mohseni, CS Lead @ Pencil. “We weren't able to make quick decisions or run really rigorous experiments because we didn't know what was going on with our entire customer base at any time.”

Along with disparate data points, the CS team at Pencil wasn’t able to communicate efficiently because they couldn’t speak the company’s shared language—data. 

“The shared language of any company, especially in tech, is data, and so CS generally has a much more qualitative perspective on things,” said Chase. “So, I, and our founders, wanted to make it a lot more quantitative.”

Ultimately, when compared to the rest of the company, the CS team felt stuck in the past. 

“When you see the other side of the house running with kind of maximal efficiency, it made you feel like you were really behind,” said Chase. “So what you do then is you double down and try to work harder, but not smarter so essentially, at the end of the day, you're saying like, ‘Well, what did I actually accomplish, except for I was looking through Google Sheets.’”

Delighting Customers, Reducing Churn: The Solution

• Configurability—does not require technical assistance/additional company resources
• Yet to hit cap on what they can accomplish with the platform—have not tapped into half of its potential
• Enables cross-functional communication & allows CS and performance teams to simplify view of product analytics and customer health
  

Pencil had hit a point of no return with their customer base, and ramping up new team members was becoming increasingly difficult. That’s when they knew it was time to bring on a dedicated Customer Success platform. 

“There was a certain number of customers we hit where it was just too much to manage in a Google spreadsheet,” said Chase. “The data was changing so rapidly that there was no real way to keep that updated systematically.”

After talking to a handful of other CS platforms, Chase kept feeling a bit disillusioned by the buying process—whether it was the team, their POV on things, or UI. Then he found Vitally. 

“I think, and some of my newer teammates have said this to me a few times, it's essentially the configurability [of Vitally],” said Chase. “So they can go by themselves on day zero and start to configure something without any direction.”

By leveraging Vitally’s conversations feature, the CS team at Pencil has been able to master personalization at scale, operate more efficiently, and better measure how their product is affecting their customers. 

Vitally’s customer health scores have enabled Pencil to have a shared language around customer health across the organization, and measure and take action on their customers’ habits.

“We've kind of dialed in health scores in a way that we understand whether they've hit their ‘habit moments',” said Chase. “That's one of the big things we're trying to measure on a day-to-day basis pretty rigorously.”

By having the ability to be in more places at once since implementing Vitally, Pencil has seen ROI in the form of delighting more customers, more often.

“So minimum, we’ve 3x’ed, if not 5x’ed, our ability to be in more places at once and actually do the core of our job,” said Chase. “Which is decreasing time to value for customers and making them feel excited about working with Pencil.”

So, how exactly has Vitally enabled the CS team at Pencil to be in more places at one? By unifying all of their customer data and information. 

“[Vitally] allows us to have just two places that we really go; Notion to do notes, and Vitally to discuss product analytics, and customer health,” said Chase. “It just makes it simpler for us, which allows us to move faster and actually do our job, which is delighting customers.”

Why Pencil Recommends Vitally to Other Customer Success Teams

• An impressive UI
• Transparent sales process
• Early stage team that’s aggressive in making improvements
  

The three factors that sold Pencil on Vitally? The product and general configurability of the product, the team, and the transparency.

“When your CTO comes to you and says, ‘I love the way this thing is built’, you know you're working with something good,” said Chase.

While a glowing review from a CTO never hurts, Vitally’s ease-of-use is what sets it apart from other antiquated players in the space.

“You know, there are different platforms where you either need an engineer to help you or you need to have some technical knowledge yourself to be able to wire it up,” said Chase. “I can write a basic SQL query to get information if I need to, but it's not something I really want to do or spend my time with. It's not a good use of the company resources.”

As for Pencil’s future with Vitally, there’s a lot of untapped potential. 

“We use [Vitally] all day, every day, and I still think we haven't hit the cap on what we can accomplish with the platform,” said Chase. “So I think that that's what's really exciting to us about it.”

For Customer Success teams who are fed up with Google Sheets (or your current CS platform), see how Vitally can help you scale CS efficiently as your book of business continues to grow, unify customer data from across your tech-stack, and help you create world-class customer experiences so you can delight more customers. Get started with a free trial when you schedule a personalized demo today.

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