How UpKeep Cut CS Admin Work by 75% with a Custom Command Center

1. Background & Context

Why a veteran CS leader decided to stop waiting for RevOps and build his own solution to the "Admin Tax".

The Leader: Joseph Schmitt

Joseph Schmitt is the SVP of Customer Success at UpKeep, a leading Asset Operations Management platform. He oversees the entire post-sales journey, managing a team of ~30 people across three key functions: Professional Services (onboarding), Customer Success (retention/expansion), and Technical Support.

The Challenge: The "40% Admin Tax"

Despite having a mature organization running for nine years, Joseph’s team was facing a critical capacity problem. Their core mandate was to engage with customers, but the mechanics of "doing the job" were getting in the way of "doing the work."

• The Ratio: For every 1 hour spent talking to a customer, there was up to 1 hour of follow-up work.
• The Cost: A capacity analysis revealed that 40% of a CSM’s time was consumed by administrative tasks.
• The Friction: The team was constantly context-switching between a fragmented stack: Salesforce, Gmail, Gong, Calendar, and various internal tools.

"The number one thing we can do is talk to our customers. The mechanics of follow-up (Salesforce management, email logging, scheduling) shouldn't be where we spend the most time. But we were losing 40% of our capacity to it."

— Joseph Schmitt, SVP of Customer Success at UpKeep

Why Standard Tools Failed

Before turning to Vybe, UpKeep tried the "traditional" paths to solve this efficiency problem, but each hit a wall:

• Customizing Salesforce: The classic approach. However, sharing Salesforce with the entire Go-To-Market team meant they were competing for limited RevOps resources. They couldn't move fast enough.
• Dedicated CS Platforms (Totango): They deployed Totango but found it "too rigid." It forced the team to adapt their workflow to the tool, rather than the other way around.
• The "AI Sprawl": As AI tools emerged, they tried everything. This led to "tool fatigue," where the team had to manage too many logins and disjointed interfaces.

The Trigger: The Need for "Hyper-Custom" Ownership

Joseph reached a breaking point where he realized he didn't want another rigid SaaS tool, nor could he wait for RevOps to build the perfect Salesforce flow.

He needed a solution that allowed him to:

• Own the workflow: Build exactly around what the team was already doing.
• Bypass the queue: Create custom tools without needing engineering or RevOps resources.
• Consolidate: Bring the disparate tools (Gmail, Salesforce, Internal Data) into one view.

2. Building Experience

How a non-technical leader used AI as a "Technical Consultant" to discover API capabilities and build faster than an engineering team.

The "Consultant" Workflow

Joseph has zero coding experience. He approached Vybe not as a developer, but as a strategist using the AI as a technical consultant. Because he couldn't read Gong’s API documentation to see what fields were available, he used Vybe to perform discovery.

• The Process: He would ask, "Hey, I want to accomplish this goal. What data fields are actually available inside Gong or Salesforce to make this happen?"
• The Strategy: Instead of prompting blindly, Joseph used Vybe’s "Ask Mode" to build a battle plan. Before deploying any changes, he would "gut check" the AI: "Are you confident in what we are about to do? Can you ensure this won't break anything else?" forcing the model to validate its own logic before writing code.

"I used Vybe as a consultant. I didn't know what was possible, so I had it analyze our connected tools and tell me what data we could use. It allowed me to build against reality, not just assumptions."

The "Epic" Iteration Loop

Joseph didn't wait for a perfect product. He stood up a directional workflow and immediately invited his team to break it. This created a rapid-fire debugging loop that moved faster than traditional dev cycles.

1. The Test: Team members clicked every button and submitted data to every Salesforce object.
2. The Report: If something failed, they took a screenshot of the error console and posted it to a dedicated Slack channel.
3. The Fix: Joseph simply dropped that screenshot into Vybe. The AI analyzed the error, wrote the fix, and deployed it.
4. The Result: "I’d go back to the team within a couple of minutes and say, 'Okay, it works now.' Our turnaround time for iterations was absolutely epic."

"Aha" Moments: Reading Between the Lines

The most shocking moment for Joseph wasn't just that the integrations worked—it was that Vybe understood them better than the documentation did.

• Salesforce Intimacy: Vybe logged into their Salesforce instance and immediately understood the complex record requirements that Joseph wasn't even aware of, guiding him through required fields he had missed.
• The API Miracle: While building a tool connected to their internal API, Joseph hit a wall where the documentation was outdated. Vybe analyzed the structure of their existing API, inferred the missing endpoint, and successfully called an API that wasn't even documented.

"It understood the structure of how we build our API and figured out a missing endpoint that even our documentation didn't have. That was a 'holy s***' moment."

3. Impact & Results

How creating a centralized "Command Center" reduced administrative overhead by 75% and improved data quality overnight.

75% Reduction in "Admin Time"

The impact on the Customer Success team's capacity was measurable almost immediately. The workflow that used to consume 40% of their week—post-call follow-ups—was radically streamlined.

• The Old Way: A CSM would spend up to 1 hour navigating between Gong, Gmail, and Salesforce to log a call and update records.
• The Vybe Way: Using the custom app, that same process now takes 15 minutes.
• The Result: A 75% reduction in administrative overhead, directly freeing up capacity for customer engagement.

The "10x" Data Quality Boost

Speed usually comes at the cost of quality, but Joseph saw the opposite. By integrating Gong transcripts directly into the workflow, the system now "listens" to the conversation and auto-fills complex Salesforce case records.

• Intelligent Automation: The app identifies the Case Record Type from the transcript and prescribes the correct field data automatically.
• One-Click Completion: CSMs simply hit a button, and the AI fills every required field.
• Downstream Impact: "The level of detail they are providing now in their cases is 10 times better. That means better communication across our entire support and product organization because the data is actually complete."

A New Leadership Standard: "Map It, Then Build It"

The success of the platform has fundamentally changed how Joseph manages his leadership team. He is no longer just asking them to manage their teams; he is asking them to engineer their operations.

• The Mandate: Joseph asked his leaders to map out their teams' entire workflows step-by-step to identify manual repetition.
• The Question: "If the team is doing something on repeat, is there a tool we can build to solve it?"
• The Expansion: This mindset has already identified the next target: moving the implementation team off their legacy project management tool entirely to build a better, centralized experience on Vybe.

4. Reflection & Looking Ahead

The vision for a "Salesforce-free" workflow and why Joseph believes the ideal builder is just anyone who can imagine the "perfect tool."

The Vision: The "Command Center" (No Salesforce Required)

While the current app handles follow-up and outreach, Joseph’s ultimate goal is much more ambitious: complete centralization. He envisions a world where his Customer Success Managers (CSMs) never have to log into Salesforce again.

• The Goal: A single interface where a CSM can see their email, manage their calendar, dial out via Outreach, view cases, and push Chatter notes.
• The Philosophy: "The mission is: Can it live in Vybe? Can we centralize every single thing they do in other tools into one place?"

What’s Next: Killing Slide Decks and Fixing Data Ingestion

Joseph has two major roadmap items for the immediate future:

1. The Implementation Wizard He is building a tool to replace the static slide decks and spreadsheets currently used during customer onboarding.

• The New Flow: An interactive "Wizard" that guides customers through onboarding in a concise way. All data collected is pushed directly back into Salesforce, while transcripts handle the follow-up emails automatically.

2. The Data Ingestion Engine The Professional Services team spends huge amounts of admin time cleaning up customer data, which arrives in "every format you could possibly think of."

• The Plan: Build a Vybe tool to intake, clean, and standardize this messy data automatically, then push it directly into the product. Joseph calls this "the biggest game changer we have."

The Ideal User Profile: The "Imaginator"

When asked who should use Vybe, Joseph doesn't describe a technical profile. He describes a mindset.

"The ideal user is anyone who can simply imagine: 'What would it look like if the perfect tool existed?' If you understand your team's workflow and you've used ChatGPT enough to know how to have a back-and-forth conversation, you can build. Vybe acts as the guide to take that imagination and actually execute it."