CASE STUDY
A Complete
Customer Success
Transformation Mapping
Vertex is a global pioneer in tax automation. Vertex has been in business for over 40 years and supports more than 130 countries. Over 50% of Fortune 500 Companies trust Vertex with their Tax automation needs. A majority of the top 10 customers in top industries all rely on Vertex to simplify their tax complexity.
“CSM Practice’s partnership and leadership were instrumental at a pivotal time for us. With our new Customer Success lead on board, we are putting our structure in place and executing on the strategy that was developed and getting the training and tools in place.”
Kate Shields, Chief Customer Officer at Vertex Inc.
THE OVERVIEW
The Vertex Customer Success team consists of Technical Account Managers, Customer Success Specialists, and Account Services Representatives. These roles had limited existing processes and acted in a reactive manner. The teams were initially focused on helping customers with support and migration issues, being highly reactive to customers’ requests. Customer coverage was limited and processes were executed inconsistently since process and policy documentation were scarce.
THE CHALLENGE
The customer success team spent most of their time in reactive mode. Vertex needed help to understand what building a world-class Customer Success organization might entail ensuring scalability. This provided the team with the opportunity to define their customer success charter and establish clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Vertex lacked a consistent process to build value with their customers through meaningful engagements.
“The detailed recommendations provided by CSM Practice have set our Customer Success team for years of success. We deliver a superior onboarding experience to our customers and a clear journey we take them through to maximize value with our solutions.”
Paul Palmer, Director, Customer Success at Vertex Inc.
THE SOLUTION
CSM Practice worked with Vertex to understand its current organizational structure, processes, and systems. Our firm highlighted opportunities to align Vertex’s current Customer Success practice with the industry’s best practices.
CSM Practice then provided a documented detailed framework for a new scalable Customer Success Organization including the customer journey, role definitions for new positions within the team, detailed Onboarding playbooks, and Customer Health Score workbooks, and much more.
THE IMPACT
With the help of CSM Practice, Vertex gained a fresh perspective on Customer Success and established a roadmap for developing a scalable practice.
Vertex has the tools to provide proactive engagements with its customers. These engagements occur with customers of all sizes due to the scaling tools provided. The playbooks that CSM Practice designed will allow the Vertex Customer Success team to provide a consistent onboarding experience, drive adoption, and improve Customer Health. Implementing CSM Practice’s recommendations introduced a path for a customer success program designed to accelerate product adoption and revenue growth.
Explore the services that helped Vertex build a World-class Customer Success Organization
Explore the services that helped Vertex build a world-class Customer Success organization
Customer Success Strategy
Develop a customer success framework in alignment with your company’s go to market strategy
Customer Success Processes
Scale your operations, increase cross functional collaboration and deliver a consistent experience
“CSM Practice highlighted areas we needed to improve both internally and cross-functionally after interviewing a large number of internal stakeholders. The assessment performed has allowed Vertex to accelerate our ability to transition from a reactive model to a proactive mature Customer Success practice.”
Lori Sator, Director – Customer Success, at Vertex Inc.
