Case Study

SmartPass: Building an Operations Function from the Ground Up

K-12 EdTech — Acquired by Raptor Technologies, December 2024

The Company

SmartPass is a K-12 student accountability platform trusted by over 2,500 schools nationwide. It replaces traditional paper hall passes with a digital system that minimizes classroom disruptions, maximizes instructional time, and makes student movement easier for teachers and administrators to manage. SmartPass serves school districts across the United States — selling into one of the most operationally complex buying environments in software: K-12 education.

The Challenge

When operations work began at SmartPass, the company was generating under a million dollars in annual revenue and had no formal operations function. The systems that most growing SaaS companies take for granted — a reliable CRM, a structured billing process, a customer success program, a support team with defined response standards — either didn't exist or were held together with manual workarounds.

The specific challenges were significant and compounding:

The CRM in use wasn't built for the complexity of a growing SaaS business. Deal records, contact records, and company records weren't meaningfully connected, making it impossible to have a reliable view of the pipeline or customer base.

Billing was manual and disconnected. Invoices were created without a system connecting them to deal records or purchase orders. Collections were reactive, with no automation for overdue accounts and no integration between the finance stack and the CRM.

Customer support existed in name only. Response times ranged from 8 to 24 hours on a platform marketed as live chat. During peak periods like back-to-school season, individual team members were handling more than 50 simultaneous conversations with no triage system, no routing logic, and no self-serve resolution path.

There was no customer success function. Schools were canceling not because the product failed them but because nobody had shown them how to use it. Renewal conversations were happening too late, with the wrong contacts, and without the internal visibility to act proactively. Retention sat at 70%.

Compliance was handled ad hoc. Every new school district sent data privacy agreements and technical security questionnaires. Responses were gathered manually from the CTO one at a time, with no system for reusing answers or building institutional knowledge.

The operations function didn't exist. Everything was either sitting on one person's plate or falling through the cracks entirely.

What We Built

Revenue Operations

The first major initiative was a full CRM migration to HubSpot, rebuilding the entire data architecture from scratch. Every company, contact, and deal record was restructured so that relationships between them were enforced and reliable. Custom properties were built to support the specific data points SmartPass needed to manage its pipeline and customer base.

HubSpot was then integrated with the finance stack, creating a live connection between billing and the CRM. Invoices became associated with deal records. Payment status became visible inside HubSpot. Collections stopped being reactive — automated email workflows triggered at 30, 60, and 90 days overdue, sent from a dedicated billing address, without requiring manual intervention.

The quote generation process was rebuilt completely. A playbook was designed inside HubSpot that sales reps could run during a live demo — capturing school name, district, and student count through a structured form. While the demo was in progress, backend workflows used those inputs to automatically create a deal record and generate a fully calculated quote. By the end of the meeting, the sales rep had a customer-ready quote to present on the spot — turning a process that previously required follow-up and manual work into a same-meeting close enabler.

Post-demo follow-up sequences were automated. Instead of sales reps manually tracking every open deal, sequences ran automatically based on deal stage and timing, keeping prospects engaged without adding to the team's workload.

Customer Operations

The customer support function was rebuilt from the ground up. A dedicated support team was hired and trained — not just on the product but on the standard of service expected. A two-minute first response time KPI was established and consistently achieved. CSAT targets were set at 4.5 and maintained.

The support infrastructure was redesigned with an intelligent triage system at the start of every conversation — presenting customers with categorized options based on their need. Each path branched intelligently: a customer already on the highest tier didn't see an upgrade option. A customer on a free trial was routed toward purchasing. Each branch surfaced relevant help articles before routing to a live agent, reducing the volume of conversations requiring human intervention and dramatically improving resolution time. Working hours logic was built in — customers reaching out outside business hours received clear expectations, while those reaching out during hours were routed immediately to available agents.

An internal support tool was built that gave the customer support team the ability to resolve common product-level issues themselves without escalating to engineering — replacing a process that only one person could execute and making the support function genuinely scalable.

A customer success function was built alongside support. Onboarding programs were designed specifically for K-12 users — teachers and principals who needed visual, step-by-step guidance to adopt the product. A knowledge base was built with annotated screenshots and GIFs. Product enhancements were proposed and shipped — including an in-app billing banner surfacing renewal status, upcoming dates, and suspension warnings directly to school administrators, removing the dependency on the operations team to manage every renewal conversation manually.

Systems and Automation

As the team and product grew, HubSpot became the central hub for the entire business. Tools across the stack — finance, support, product, and beyond — were connected so that information previously scattered across multiple platforms flowed back into HubSpot automatically. The team stopped switching between tools to find answers because the answers were all in one place.

Every manual process that could be automated was evaluated and rebuilt as a scalable workflow. Survey tools were integrated so customer feedback flowed directly into HubSpot without manual data entry. The principle throughout was consistent: if one person has to do it every time, it isn't built right yet.

EdTech Compliance

K-12 EdTech has a compliance burden that most SaaS companies aren't prepared for. Every new school district comes with a data privacy agreement. Many come with multi-page technical security questionnaires. Some come with RFPs. None of this is optional.

A reusable response system was built — common technical and security questions were documented and organized so the team could respond to standard questionnaires without engineering involvement. A customer legal team was built and trained to manage the full compliance workflow end to end. The compliance function went from a bottleneck on the CTO's plate to a team-managed process that ran without engineering dependency.