Last week we were thrilled to announce our Series A funding round led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused fund. Not only was this a significant milestone for the business, but it also validated the growing recognition that every company in the world must take note of the increasing regulatory and social pressures to become more ethical. More on this here.
At Vault Platform, we recognize that this change can only be carried out in a meaningful way if it starts with a human-centric approach. Our hypothesis from the outset has been that people need psychological safety in order to Speak Up about misconduct – and effectively resolve it – in their place of work. There needs to be trust between employees and the company, and we know that more than often there isn’t. In addition to creating innovative technology that underpins this trust building, we are transforming the overall customer experience, so that when companies buy Vault Platform they are not just getting the products they need, but access to a whole world of value.
Ever since we were founded, we’ve heard time and time again our customers’ frustrations at the underutilized ‘outsourced services’ they’ve bought. What many of them are even more frustrated with though, is the 1990s-style ‘support models’ they’ve had to deal with as well. Our customers – predominantly those driving the Compliance, Legal and HR/People functions – have benefitted in many aspects of their jobs from modern, consumer-style enterprise technologies; however, when it comes to the Ethics & Compliance tools they buy, they’re experiencing an analog world while living in a digital age.
This experience ends with Vault Platform.
Here are the three things we’ve learned so far that we’re using to create an unrivaled customer experience at Vault Platform.
1. Our Customers are both the companies who buy our products and the employees who use them.
The problems that we’re solving are complex, deep, and widespread. Providing the best case management solution in the world is useless if nobody reports their experiences. Conversely, the best SpeakUp tool in the world is useless if your company can’t respond to you directly, investigate thoroughly, and build trust with you throughout.
Vault Platform is doing all of this with both our products and the support we’re providing for our customers. One reason many of our customers say they’ve bought Vault Platform is to build or strengthen trust with their employees. We’ve internalized this and built our onboarding and awareness programs around trust-building. Our onboarding comes with a fully developed suite of materials and we’ve seen our customers – both the largest and smallest – tailor them to make them their own. We love that our customers span industries, geographies, maturities, and sizes, and we believe in the value of providing robust foundations that make it easy for our customers to overlay their unique strategy and tone of voice.
2. Vault Platform drives cross-team collaboration.
Before Vault Platform, our customers had one thing in common – there was always one owner of the hotline. Not one team; one single person! A single person who was the be-all and end-all when it came to all things hotline related. This included everything from vendor selection to implementation, awareness, usage, and reporting. This person was often relying on spreadsheets or outdated software to get their arms around all misconduct. And while one person owned the third-party solution, many, many other people had a vested interest in its success, without any input, ownership, or accountability.
To solve this, collaboration is both a core value and driving principle behind Vault Platform – reflected across our own business and culture, our products, and yes, our approach to customer support too. This is why we created the Resolution Hub, which provides multiple users with visibility to a single system of record. This is why we equip our stakeholders with transparent business insights and management information so they can proactively direct their cultural interventions without being dependent on another team to provide them with the information.
And beyond bringing teams and business communities together through the actual use of our products, we start the process of collaboration during the initial onboarding experience and then continued at various touchpoints throughout their journey with Vault Platform too. Enabling these diverse teams to connect, and then empowering them to overcome challenges and progressively grow their culture together, in true partnership.
From the outset, we’ve endeavored to bridge the silos these teams often operate in. We’ve helped our customers bridge gaps across their leadership teams – in particular, helping deepen relationships between Compliance Officers, General Counsels, and People Officers. Through our conversations with major multinational organizations (especially those going through an IPO), we understand how intricate their relationships are, and how dependent they are on each other to shape ethics, cultural direction and overall business success.
3. Empathy, Empathy, Empathy.
Perhaps the most important lesson we’ve learned in all our years supporting customers is that empathy is the single most important ingredient to successful relationships. Being able to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, especially when the going gets tough, means that we’ll be that much more capable of understanding their pain and creating real solutions for them.
We see this play out when we onboard new customers – by equipping our champions with the tools and messages they need to make “Launch Day” a true celebration of company culture. We see this play out when prospects want to hear from those who’ve already been through the move to Vault Platform, and our amazing customers take valuable time out of their busy days to speak to someone unknown. And we see this play out when our customers tell us that just by virtue of introducing Vault Platform, their employees already feel part of a more trusting, psychologically safe environment.
This is why we’ll be formalizing our customer network in the coming months. Creating a safe space for Vault Platform customers to share their ideas, best practices, challenges, and learnings about how to build a more ethical workplace.
I happened to join Vault Platform on the day our very first customer launched our product to their business. And it has been a privilege each and every day since then to help shape our ethos, our company, and our way forward as we step through our mission of transforming the ethics industry. I am beyond thrilled that I get to steward our customers through their journey with Vault Platform, participate and celebrate their success, and learn from them in the process. So here’s to the next phase of growth. Here’s to building our own ethical company, as we support others along the way.
Responsible companies run on Vault Platform – so join us!
Tori Reichman
Chief Customer Officer
