4 ways Rocketlane makes customer onboarding smoother, simpler, smarter

After Konotor, the first platform they built, was acquired by Freshworks, Rocketlane’s co-founders, Deepak, Vignesh, and Srikrishnan found themselves working with many mid-market and enterprise customers. 

Invariably, customer onboarding would mean anxiety, inconsistencies, delayed escalations, and hurried implementations until someone from the team ended up getting into superhero mode to get things done.

The result?

Customer onboarding was hit-or-miss. 

They tried different approaches to improve how things were done. For instance, there was a visibility spreadsheet that everyone had to update so the leadership team could see how different projects were doing. But even this had issues:

1. Someone had to follow up with individual team members to ensure it was updated on time. 
2. The leadership team got insights that were from the perspective of the project manager or the engagement manager. The element of customer sentiment was missing.
3. Each PM ended up creating and improving on their versions of documents and checklists, causing consistency issues. 
   

All this meant that customers were subject to these inconsistencies and got a poor experience.

The founders saw how under-serviced the customer onboarding space was, especially given how elaborate and intensive onboarding could be for large customers. 

And that’s how Rocketlane was born. We built it to elevate the customer onboarding experience.

The four pillars of Rocketlane’s customer onboarding experience 

Rocketlane was built to solve these issues through a focus on the four key elements of successful onboarding, namely:

1. Consistency

Rocketlane’s complete collaboration space can be set up in a few clicks for each type of project and every type of customer. 

Rocketlane is built to ensure that all tasks and processes are carried out with an assurance of consistency from start to finish. It does this through: 

Templates

You can create project templates tailored to different customer segments - size, industry, maturity level, or implementation complexity. Each of these templates is a carefully put-together combination of project plans, tasks, and collaborative documents. 

Insights

The templates you create and their iterations can be used for subsequent projects, so you are assured of insights on performance and consistency at every stage. 

2. Visibility

Rocketlane ensures that you get a 30K feet snapshot view of all the projects. Without a single click, you can hover over elements to understand what is happening inside each project, down to the details. 

Progress and Customer Sentiment

For each project, you can check ratings for key delivery milestones, what each team member is working on, any bottlenecks, delays, pending tasks, and even ad hoc tasks created on documents related to the project. 

Status Updates

You can set up easy status updates within the platform without having to send out emails to everyone involved. You can contextualize and customize each status update by simply dragging and dropping the elements you need for that particular update: pending tasks, tasks completed, notes, etc. You can have your conversations on the very same status update so you never miss the context. No more email threads, pasted links, or cross-referenced updates. 

As for your customers, all they need to do is check Rocketlane to get all the information they need! 

3. Collaboration and Productivity 

Whether you’re a project champion who needs to see the status across projects or a project manager who needs to dive into the details, you can choose to slice and dice data as you need—by region, sector, project owner, etc. 

1. Full-fledged project management: Each task is prebuilt with features/fields such as details, description, checkboxes, subtasks, templates, etc. so your team has everything it needs for tasks big and small.   
   

2. Privacy: One of Rocketlane’s most popular and useful features is the ‘private’ feature that ensures you have full control over what the customer needs to see. So if there are small internal tasks or comments that your team needs to collaborate on or a particular task that you don’t want the customer to see, you can mark it private. Your team can send private messages on a thread shared with the customer so the same thread has all the context a team member needs. You get to decide what level of visibility you want to provide your customers—tasks, comments, threads, messages, etc. can be private, visible only to your team. 

3. Integrated approvals: You can ensure a clear audit trail for key tasks and decisions by integrating approvals into the tasks. 
4. Presentation and timeline view/mode:  To ensure that all your meetings don’t need anything else, Rocketlane comes with a presentation as well as timeline mode so you can present your blueprint or methodology right on the platform. 

The interactive presentation mode has all the phases laid out so you can establish upfront what resources you need from the customer and at which stage. This can help you streamline work collaboration and communication with customers across the project. 

There is also a timeline view where you can show the customer what the timeline for the project and individual phases/tasks looks like.

1. Real-time and contextual conversations: Have discussions on any document/task in real-time without the team having to spend time and energy on emails, updates, and follow-ups to get everyone up to speed.  
   

2. Intelligent and integrated document collaboration: To prevent the risk of missing or losing track of documents, we’ve gotten rid of siloed work streams by enabling teams to track their project plan and document-related tasks all in one place. Each new project automatically generates the relevant documents. You can use any of Rocketlane’s predefined templates or create your own. 
   

3. You can embed external documents, spreadsheets, etc. in addition to native Rocketlane documents. You can add comments and create tasks right from these documents that get added to your tasks and status updates. 

4. Customer Experience

Every customer has access to their own portal with a dedicated domain. You can brand and customize this customer portal by adding your touch via logos or themes to ensure a distinct connection with your brand. Every customer gets magic links that take them to their portal so they can see what you have in store for them. 

It’s on this portal that you can take them through interactive walkthroughs of your onboarding plan, assign tasks and follow up on them, request approvals and feedback, and share updates. 

Customer onboarding needs a purpose-built solution

We believe that onboarding is the most important phase for the post-sale journey since it’s where customers experience the first real post-purchase partnership with your team and are most vulnerable. It’s also the time where both you and your customer are investing the most time and effort. 

Rocketlane can help you elevate your CX by working hand-in-hand with your customers and making them accountable partners in your journey.  Even better, it ensures that your team stays motivated and on their toes, thanks to the customer sentiment/feedback collection milestones that you can build in through the platform

Here’s what Aaron Thompson, SuccessHACKER, had to say about Rocketlane during its launch: 

Rocketlane can have a profound impact on the definition of Customer Success. Having a purpose-built product designed to remove friction points, be prescriptive, and actually touch the customer, is what onboarding needs.

With Rocketlane, we are here to help your project goals consistently and deliver a 5-star customer experience, each time, every time. 

Sign up today for a free trial.

More resources

1. Meet Rocketlane Forms: Collect and organize data in a jiffy
2. Rocketlane X Slack: Collaborate from the comfort of Slack
3. Introducing Time Tracking for Customer Projects
4. Introducing Resource Management by Rocketlane