Vitalsource

CASE STUDY

Strengthening Customer-Centric Approach Through Customer Journey Mapping

VitalSource is the leading education technology solutions provider with millions of users, supporting thousands of publishers, institutions and resellers. After going through several acquisitions, VitalSource has 3 customer success groups, including 80 customer success team members, handling 9 customer segments. It has offices in Raleigh, Boston, San Francisco, Nashville, Seattle, London, and Melbourne.

“One of the most important outcomes working with CSM Practice, is that our customer success teams all speak the same language, which immediately broke down many of our siloes. “

Shanna Daniel, Manager, Customer Success Partners, VitalSource

VitalSource Testimonial | CSM Practice

CSM Practice worked with VitalSource’s Customer Success teams on building out the customer journey maps. The framework included detailing the resources, activities, and technology needs for each of the customer lifecycle phases.

Customer Lifecycle Journey

In this recorded webinar, the VitalSource leadership team showcases the results of their work with CSM Practice: Detailed customer journey maps!

Watch this video to better understand the development process, the deliverables, and the impact the results had on their customer success organization. VitalSource has a complex business model, which makes this use case very interesting.

This recorded session is packed with tactical advice, examples, and open discussion about customer journey maps.

THE CHALLENGE

As a large company, VitalSource faced several challenges that blocked them from understanding customer expectations. Apart from typical internal post-merger challenges, they also dealt with complex customer install-base.

The new customer success leadership inherited challenges in team alignment, inefficient amalgamation, and lack of process consistency, which resulted in a mismatched customer experience. With the lack of a well-defined customer journey map, the team was mainly in firefighting mode. Finally, the lack of clear role definitions was significantly impacting employees’ morale and as a result, the employee turnover rate was high.

“We’re in a mature business, but we did not have a mature customer success practice. Customer success is a relatively new idea in our addressable market. To get us started on that path, the number one thing we wanted to achieve was to deploy customer lifecycle journey maps. Working with CSM Practice on customer journey maps was the single most impactful decision we made to improve our Customer Success practice.”.”

William Chesser, VP of Customer Success, VitalSource

THE SOLUTION

Since VitalSource has gone through multiple acquisitions in the past few years, the development of the customer journey maps was designed to promote team alignment. The initiative emphasized the similarities in the activities needed in each customer lifecycle phase and defined a common language.

As a result of working with CSM Practice, VitalSource developed a customer life-cycle journey map for each of their customer success teams. Each journey map was then adjusted to meet the unique business needs of each one of its nine customer segments.

THE IMPACT

The work with CSM Practice helped VitalSource bring all three customer success teams together as one organization. It highlighted common ground, aligned on a common language throughout the organization, and outlined a full rollout plan to ensure every customer success manager adopted the customer journey and its respective playbooks.

With the help of CSM Practice, VitalSource was able to establish a framework for effective communication, both externally and internally. The framework also helped VitalSource to concentrate on improving the post-sale customer experience and on building stronger customer relationships.

Overall, VitalSource improved morale, reduced employee turnover, fostered a proactive mode of operation, resolved business process issues, and improved the experience of their customers.