On Rocketlane's Love for Collaborative Customer Onboarding

In the list of things that make other things difficult, siloed information, frustrated customers, and escalating tensions rank high. The pandemic has changed how we work together. While we may all be connected technologically, we still find ourselves dispersed and in need of numerous platforms just to stay connected and be on the same page. Ironically, these umpteen apps, devices, and platforms meant to provide connection and enable collaboration have made it challenging to work together as a team.

We scout for a platform to get all our teams together, one for teams to exchange and brainstorm ideas, another to keep track of progress, and so many more project clones for customers and partners (because we don’t want them to see our internal mess). This is when things are going well. Imagine if things were to go wrong, though.

Let’s see how customer project management works at present.

You try to eliminate the possibility of your customers having a view of your messy kitchen by cloning project docs. One tiny issue, though: you would be inadvertently increasing the email notifications that fly into your inbox. But, this would be the least of your worries. When you realize something is missing whilst frantically switching tabs, trying to piece together every bit of information from the different versions that are now available, tensions become inevitable. You would have reached out to the customer, fully aware it might add to their frustration. The lack of coordination adds fuel to the fire, and then all your mess would be out in the open.

But, what if we told you we can make your collaboration easy? What if we told you that we have a simplified SINGLE collaboration platform to solve all your onboarding needs? We have Rocketlane for you.

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Why collaborate?

One of the biggest misconceptions about any business is that closing the deal is the end of the initial sales process. But the magic lies in how you close the deal and continue to add value to your customers, build repeat businesses, and create referrals day-in and day-out. 

Your customer onboarding phase is the most important part of the customer journey. This is the phase where you can provide the first taste of success to your customer and enable them to have a delightful experience with your offering. You are time-bound here because you and the customer walk into the deal with certain expectations. Expectations related to revenue, efficiency, customer experience, or more. And if these expectations are not met, the entire relationship becomes a ticking bomb, ready to explode any second. You can indeed fight the fires later on. But proactive work from the very beginning helps you save a ton of time and essential resources.

This is where collaboration, visibility, customer experience, productivity, and consistency, enter the stage. They walk hand-in-hand and are the best of best friends. We'll tell you why they receive all the attention, love, and care here at Rocketlane. In this blog, we will talk to you about one of them, collaboration.

Rocketlane’s love for collaboration

Theoretically, collaboration should be simple. Collaboration is after all defined as being receptive to your customer's needs and improving their experience. So, how hard can it be, right? Unfortunately, even the tiniest of complications along the way can derail your project and make collaborating far more cumbersome than you would think. 

Today, your team and customers are distributed. Rocketlane helps you streamline your collaboration and communication with customers across projects into one unified workspace. 

At Rocketlane, collaboration is one of the cornerstones around which we build features. We realize that customer onboarding is no single-player game, with only the vendor or the customer. You need both parties to be working together coherently to be successfully onboarded. That starts with the division of responsibility or work that each party needs to do. And even while doing that work, they're going to have questions for each other, and the need for clarifications or consultations is bound to arise. Hence, collaboration is at the core of every onboarding journey. But, it is not just task and task-related conversations that are needed. 

A lot of document collaboration also happens during onboarding because you're working together towards a singular goal, with other requirements, test cases, and various whatnots needed. So, it would help if you could work together on those items. And when parts of collaboration happen outside of the core onboarding platform, information gets siloed, and people can't stay on top of everything happening across Slack and Google Docs.

With Rocketlane,all your conversations are simplified. It's a tightly knit experience, and that's precisely why we bring collaboration into every aspect of Rocketlane, right from status updates to documents, tasks, and projects. Each part is built with a multi-arch collaboration in mind. Rocketlane supports and provides the same delightful experience for all kinds of internal or external collaboration.

How Rocketlane enables easy, seamless collaboration

1. Using multiple tools? Don’t be old school!

Using multiple tools for your customer onboarding can be tedious. Information tends to get siloed when spread across Slack, Sheets, Docs, and PM tools. It just feels like there's always so much clutter all around. 

Rocketlane lets you have discussions on any document/task in real-time without the team spending time and energy on emails, updates, and follow-ups to get everyone up to speed. To mitigate the risk of missing or losing track of documents, Rocketlane enables teams to track their project plan and document-related tasks all in one place. With the option to embed external documents, spreadsheets, etc., in addition to native predefined templates and documents on Rocketlane, collaboration just got a whole lot easier.

2. Can’t hold customers accountable? Now, that’s preventable!

Customers play a pivotal role in determining the success of your onboarding project. And, you need to make their time with you worthwhile. Making them active partners in the onboarding journey has its perks. 

Rocketlane lets you do this and more. Customers become your partners throughout the journey. Rocketlane lets you invite customers to your project with 'magic links.' This way, they can access the information they need without logging in. The customizable customer portal lets you ensure the brand experience is intact. You can create a workspace for the project and simply add your customer as a collaborator. Customers will then be able to access an overview of the project, learn where they need to unblock you, and can actively participate in the onboarding. You can assign tasks to them and add deadlines for each task. You can also set up automated reminders to gently nudge your customers towards getting stuff done so that the pace of the project is not altered. This way, customers will not have to run to keep up with their tasks and activities. Adding sub-tasks and checklists to the project helps ensure nothing is missed. Customers can also be offered encouragement by creating 'milestones' to achieve. The best part is that you can plug CSAT surveys at different points in the duration of the onboarding project and get your customer's feedback to improve your onboarding. Make them feel heard, and use their feedback to improve your onboarding.  

3. Scattered communication(s)? It always leads to complications

Suffering from scattered communication channels syndrome, when you don't know where what is and what has been happening in what context? Bid goodbye to all that with Rocketlane.

Rocketlane's Status Updates feature facilitates regular communication with customers on the progress of crucial tasks and activities. Create and share status updates, and have all contextual conversations within Rocketlane. Integrating approvals into tasks allows you to ensure a clear audit trail for critical tasks and decisions. To get your customer's attention for approval or sign off, you just have to tag them. With Rocketlane's unified workspace, you don't have to worry about juggling between different communication channels.

4. Can’t control who sees what? Time to give it some thought.

When all documents, sheets, and information are out in the open, you have no track of who will be viewing all of them, and there's just no privacy. Rocketlane's private feature puts an end to all that.

Rocketlane allows for collaborating with privacy by completely controlling what your customer gets access to. Your team can access everything related to the onboarding project, and you can make sure your customers access only the tasks and documents they need. Private conversations, tasks, documents, and updates all stay within the context of the project but are never shared with the customer. 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 simply mark it private. Your team can even send private messages on a thread shared with the customer, so the same thread has the entire 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 made private to be visible only to your team. Additionally, you don't need to maintain version control on any file or document manually because you'll be sharing only what is required.

Extras: Full-fledged project management

Additionally, in each task, Rocketlane has pre-built fields such as details, descriptions, checkboxes, subtasks, templates, etc. Your team has everything it needs to ensure a smooth and delightful onboarding journey for the customer. The presentation and timeline view/mode aids you to present your blueprint or methodology right on the platform. This mode is made interactive and has all the phases marked to demarcate what resources are required from the customer. The timeline view shows the customer the timeline for the project and individual phases.

The long story short

To rid you of siloed work streams and escalations, Rocketlane's built-in features streamline work collaboration and help improve productivity. Rocketlane helps you in holding customers accountable and allows your onboarding/implementation team to calm the butterflies in their tummies by enabling collaboration while onboarding. And that's how we do it.

Rocketlane would thus be your best bet at solving all your customer onboarding needs.  

To collaborate efficiently and effectively with your team and your customers, try Rocketlane today!

More on Rocketlane

1. 4 Ways Rocketlane Makes Customer Onboarding Smoother, Simpler, Smarter 
2. How Rocketlane’s Salesforce integration ensures a smooth customer onboarding experience
3. Meet Rocketlane Forms: Collect and organize data in a jiffy
4. Rocketlane X Slack: Collaborate from the comfort of Slack
5. Introducing Time Tracking for Customer Projects
6. Introducing Resource Management by Rocketlane