How Vimeo consolidated tools and created fully custom apps

Vimeo’s platform is used by creative professionals, businesses and organizations in more than 190 countries. The pioneering company was the first to support HD video and now boasts over 260 million active users around the world. As a newly minted public company, customer experience teams identified an opportunity to modernize its technology and drive efficient growth. “We foresaw a massive growth in our user base and anticipated the need to consolidate best practices and standardize our workflows,” said Kristen Kampetis. “Our previous partner was using various tools that weren’t originally designed for us, which created an inherent problem.”

Kristen is the Director of Customer Experience Operations at Vimeo where she leads a nimble team of program managers and automation engineers who build the workflows and tools that facilitate the enterprise journey. In partnership with the implementation and customer success teams, they work to deploy Vimeo inside customers' organizations. Her team recognized early on that their internal struggles with mining information in fragmented tools would likely impact their customers' day-to-day experience.

Leta Amburgey, Vimeo’s VP of Customer Experience, calls this problem the “swivel chair.” “Working out of ten tools reduces efficiency and prevents your employees from becoming subject matter experts. It’s completely disruptive to continuously go through decision trees without knowing where to source actionable information.”

Vimeo’s customer experience team encountered a familiar problem: a lack of off-the-shelf software that uniquely caters to their needs without requiring significant investment. Organizations often cobble together tools that address individual parts of their work, increasing their technology spending and hurting teams’ efficiency as they work across multiple applications. Vimeo wanted a single solution that could be customized to how the company operates and was already using Airtable in some of its operations. The team decided to expand its partnership to further reduce its costs and deliver a better customer experience in the process.

Kristen and her team created an Airtable app that acts as the central hub of information for teams that work directly with Vimeo’s enterprise-level customers. It’s where customer success and implementation managers track the health of accounts, manage day-to-day interactions with customers, and understand product usage to identify where people may need help. The app connects seven Vimeo teams and counting:implementation, customer success, account management, support, customer marketing, operations and product. Everyone works with consistent, reliable, and accessible data. For customers, this equates to a consistent experience, regardless of who they’re interacting with at Vimeo. “Airtable helped us immediately solve our problems. It was truly enjoyable to scale our team in order to manage customer interactions,” Kristen said.

From there, Vimeo connected additional apps for their unique needs, including for tracking customer marketing opportunities and product feature requests. People can now easily log feature requests, which are automatically connected with CRM data so teams can identify the potential revenue impact. Product managers are then automatically assigned to each incoming request, and everyone on the team can track how product updates are moving in the pipeline and easily establish expectations with clients.

“Airtable enables multiple teams to pull data from the same place, apply a different lens and construct creative solutions to improve our employee and our customer experiences,” said Leta. This coordinated approach is increasing how quickly Vimeo customers are adopting new features. “Our teams are much more coordinated with each other, and in turn, our customers gain a clearer story and direction for how they can use Vimeo’s tools,” said Kristen.

Before Airtable, customer experience teams were forced to use brittle tools that forced them into a series of workarounds. In Airtable they’re able to quickly create and deploy fully customized apps – consolidating more than 15 workflows ranging from performance tracking, to resource allocation, to customer tiering, to operations project tracking. These typically required up to seven different tools to manage.

For Vimeo, this approach has been a much more empowering way to cut costs. Leta’s maximizing existing resources and delivering on ROI without cutting back on headcount. “Airtable makes us more successful by enabling us to do more with less. This level of operational efficiency and cost savings is invaluable.”