How Vanta Ensures Customer Success with Polytomic

Introducing Vanta‍

Vanta is a software company that automates security monitoring for certifications such as SOC 2, HIPAA, and ISO 27001. They increase consumer confidence in software companies by helping customers improve and prove their security. 

Kevin is a Business Operations Engineer at Vanta. He is the primary technical resource for all things related to business operations and the resident expert for business tools such as Salesforce. He joined Vanta when there were five employees and has seen the company grow to nearly 100.‍

Teams Benefitting from Polytomic ‍

Customer Success 

Vanta’s Customer Success team works in Salesforce. Polytomic regularly pipes internal customer data into Salesforce, enabling the team to easily see the state of the customer and generate reports within their home system.

As a company dedicated to data security, Vanta handles sensitive customer information. It is very careful to keep it guarded and sectioned away from other systems. Kevin has found Polytomic makes it much easier to safely distribute the necessary information.‍

“We aggregate customer metrics and save them into an analytics database. Polytomic is then used to further aggregate or sanitize sensitive data before saving it in different business systems.” 

By having the relevant data on hand in Salesforce piped by Polytomic, Vanta’s Customer Success team can immediately resolve customer issues.‍

Product Support

The Product Support team uses data in Zendesk populated by Polytomic. Without leaving Zendesk, they can see if a new user is having problems with Vanta’s product so that they can immediately loop in the Customer Success Manager if needed. They can also see each customer’s software stack which assists with troubleshooting. 

“Before Polytomic, accessing internal customer data for the Support team was a pain. I had developed a tool to solve the problem; a JSON schema form that queried our internal API. Our Support agents would fill out the smart form which sent queries to retrieve the data they needed. Now, Polytomic regularly syncs data into native Zendesk data stores. This enables our Support team to view and generate reports directly in their home system.”‍

Sales

To reassure companies that Vanta’s products will work for them, the Sales team built an innovative tool within Salesforce that connects existing customers with prospects. This solution identifies existing customers similar to a prospect and highlights those willing to communicate with that prospect. The tool relies on data that Polytomic pipes into Salesforce, and has been important for building trust with prospects. ‍

“We're able to connect customers and prospects that are in the same shoes or “tech stack”. Prospects can hear about our product directly from customers rather than our salespeople. We're in the business of trust, so giving a reference is the best thing we can do to build trust.”‍

Billing

One of Vanta’s recurring concerns was the misidentification of active or inactive accounts. This would potentially lead to active users being locked out or incorrectly billed. Polytomic has significantly reduced this because it allows Kevin to sync account activity to Salesforce clearly identifying active users.‍

“Polytomic helps keep things in sync by updating data between our systems at a regular cadence, allowing us to flag inconsistencies. It’s had a big impact on reducing our error margins. We've exploded in growth and with Polytomic’s help we've reduced inactive user identification errors from 7-10% to 1-2%, preventing billing issues. ”‍

Engineering 

Vanta’s Engineering team also benefits from Polytomic because they have improved visibility of product issues. ‍

“The Customer Success and Support teams now notice trends that indicate common product pain points, which they pass to the Engineering team. Engineering can begin fixing issues before customers notice, providing a preemptive feedback system for product improvement."

Kevin will continue using Polytomic to ensure that data is moving properly between systems and teams. As the company grows, Polytomic will help quickly expose the source of problems.‍

“Polytomic is a crucial safety net for us. If things aren’t in sync, Polytomic is a great backup that makes issues visible and helps us identify the cause.”‍

Organization-wide Benefits of Polytomic 

Vanta uses many software products for its day-to-day operations. It uses Polytomic to better communicate between tools and teams, benefitting the whole organization. Polytomic is crucial for highlighting data that requires attention. Now, Vanta is able to act much quicker on problems.‍

Team Coordination

“Communication between tools is key. Polytomic improves team coordination by using data trends to flag actions across systems. For example, we use Polytomic to aggregate usage trends and determine customer pain points. Customer Success Managers investigate and alleviate these pain points with the users and report back to the Product team. We use this feedback loop to proactively identify new features and improvements for our roadmap.”‍

Engagement Score

Vanta built an Engagement Score, which takes factors like the customer's subscribed services and level of support interactions to create a score for each user. This metric has become a strong indicator of customer retention. Polytomic plays a central role in creating this score and propagating it to different business systems like Salesforce. 

“The Engagement Score is fully powered by Polytomic. It pulls in all the data, performs calculations, then pipes results to our business systems.”

This metric has been helpful for Vanta in many ways, from seeking investment to internal planning. ‍

Helping Vanta’s Continued Growth

As Vanta grows, it will continue relying on internal data to best serve its customers. Polytomic plays a key role in this effort; using it enables Vanta to reduce ticket resolution times, create preemptive product feedback loops, and propagate the Customer Engagement Score throughout the company. Polytomic is thrilled to be on this journey with Vanta as they make software companies more secure.