Who is Productboard?
John Henwood, Senior Director of Customer Success @ Productboard
Productboard is on a mission to help companies like Zendesk, Zoom, HERE Technologies, Vitally, and thousands more, build truly excellent products by helping product managers understand what customers need, prioritize what to build next, and rally everyone around the roadmap.
Check out Productboard's Customer Story
Blind Spots: The Problem
- No way to monitor the health of their customer base
- Uncertainty around whether or not they were focusing on the most impactful actions for their business—and book of business
- Struggled to provide visibility into their customer base to the rest of the organization
Before starting with Vitally, Productboard did not have a good sense of the health of their customer base. Because of this, the Customer Success team struggled to make decisions around where to spend their time and choosing the right actions to focus on. It also prevented them from having really good insights about their customers that they could then share with the rest of the business.
“Not having that insight into the health of our customer base created some blind spots for us as a team,” said John. “We needed that understanding in order to make decisions that would improve the value that our customers would gain, and make better decisions around how we could deploy our resources effectively across the Customer Success team.”
The Customer Success team at Productboard had tried their hand with larger Customer Success platforms, and even a business intelligence tool, but as their growth skyrocketed, they needed a tool that they could get up and running quickly and easily.
“We needed a tool that could give us business insights without needing an analyst or a dedicated sales operations person to help run it,” said John. “We really needed something that we’d have a really short time-to-value on.”
Cutting Gross Churn by 50%: The Solution
- Industry-leading time-to-value allowed the Customer Success team to get up and running quickly
- Leveraged Segment and SFDC bi-directional integrations to power visibility internally and cross-departmentally
- Intuitive platform helps the Customer Success team do their jobs effectively, without too much overhead
Productboard was able to get up and running in no time with Vitally for a couple of key reasons; 1) Because of Vitally’s flexible, plug-and-play integrations, they didn't need a data team or operations experts to handle the integrations; 2) Due to the intuitiveness of Vitally’s platform, existing team members are able to self-adopt and new hires are able to ramp up quickly.
“Features like the Salesforce integration are really flexible in their ability to both connect and bi-directionally sync customer data,” said John. “Even myself, who’s not an operations expert, was able to make some of those connections, which has really helped us move quickly.”
By segmenting their customer base and building health scores based on those different cohorts, Productboard was not only able to gain a contextual understanding of their customers’ health, but they were able to communicate what was happening across key customer segments to the rest of the company.
“We were really looking for a tool that could help inform our decisions around what our customer experience should look like,” said John. “We’re able to answer some really core business questions with Vitally that we weren't able to do prior to implementing it—that’s helped us accelerate our pace of decision-making.”
Productboard’s own time to value has also improved by leveraging Vitally’s Projects feature for customer onboarding, helping them to keep every customer on track throughout the implementation process.
As for the rest of the customer lifecycle, CSMs are able to set themselves up with the right insights before every check-in and QBR—helping customers identify opportunities for them to get more value out of the product.
“In 2020 alone, we reduced our gross churn relatively by 50%,” said John. “Even as we scaled, we were able to spend our time as wisely as possible with customers.”
Why Productboard Recommends Vitally to Other Customer Success Teams
- Powerful integrations
- Product is so intuitive that the Productboard team, new hires in particular, can truly help themselves
- Able to support teams that are scaling rapidly
- Incredibly thoughtful and responsive Customer Success team
“We like to think that customers using Productboard are building really great products.”
From the powerful plug-and-play integrations—most notably Intercom, Segment, and SFDC—to the intuitiveness of the platform, Vitally has empowered Productboard’s Customer Success team to scale quickly, make smarter decisions faster, and establish themselves as the true north of customer intelligence within Productboard.
“Whether it be Product or Marketing, we've really started to be seen as the team that can give the business some really good intelligence around what's important to our customers, and where other teams should spend their time.”
So, does Productboard recommend Vitally? Well, it depends on whether or not you want to understand what’s happening across your business.
“If you're scaling a Customer Success team that needs to make quick decisions, understand what's happening across your business, have somewhere where you can really ask some core business questions and really simply get the answer you need—without having to ask someone in a more technical capacity to help get those insights for you—then I'd absolutely recommend Vitally.”
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