Hear from Assistantly CMO Joyce Golden on how they use Dock to create a simplified, and on-brand customer experience—while freeing up valuable time for both their Customer Success team and their clients.
Overview
Here’s the TL;DR:
- Challenge: Assistantly’s offshore-talent hiring service requires a lot of back-and-forth communication with customers. Communicating through emails, meetings, and file attachments was time-consuming for their Client Success team, their customers, and their talent. Their busy customers often missed emails and were confused as to what came next. They needed one place to host their client experience over long-term customer engagements.
- Solution: Assistantly created a workspace template in Dock to act as a single hub for their end-to-end client experience. Their Client Success team creates a personalized workspace for each customer—providing information about their talent hires, next steps, customer resources, and meeting summaries from one link. They use the same workspace to drive upsells and repeat customer engagements. More recently, they’ve also started using Dock during the sales process to share personalized recommendations with prospects.
- Results: Since adopting Dock, Assistantly’s Client Success team can now send personalized follow-up to customers in minutes—in what used to take hours. Using Dock as a client hub is also saving their clients an estimated 5 hours of follow-up communications. As a result, they’re also receiving far fewer customer questions and can deliver more value to customers in less time.
“From the very beginning of sales until onboarding—I would say we're easily saving each customer a good five hours because we're not having those back-and-forth conversations." - Joyce Golden, CMO, Assistantly
The Challenge
Joyce Golden is the Chief Marketing Officer at Assistantly—a startup that helps small and medium-sized businesses hire and retain offshore talent.
“We help them hire amazing talent offshore by connecting them with partners that we like to call unicorns to get the job—whatever job that is—done. So whether that's social media, marketing, or client support, we find the best partner for them.”
The big win Assistantly is trying to achieve for their customers is time.
Hiring, developing, and retaining talent are all hugely time-consuming activities that require ongoing relationship management.
“For Assistantly, a successful client relationship is a long relationship. Our tagline is to find, hire, manage, and support,” said Joyce. “When hiring anybody, you need to find the right person to begin with and then keep them inside of your business and teach them along the way. That person is going to develop into the person that you originally wanted to hire.”
Here’s the big challenge for Assistantly:
While helping their customers bring talent on board, they have to create less work for their clients, not more. Their customers are already exceptionally busy.
“Our greatest challenge in collaborating with our customers was digital debt.”
“All of our clients—they’re business owners, they're executives, they're leaders in the company. And they've already established communication standards. Trying to match them where they're at cost our team a lot of time and energy.”
“We are trying to reduce stress and give them back energy and life into their business,” said Joyce. “That gives them the ability to do the things that are best in their wheelhouse.”
Dedicating enough time to making the right hire without overwhelming the customer is a tightrope act.
For example, here’s Assistantly’s end-to-end client experience:
- Assistantly’s Customer Success Lead holds a 30-minute to 2-hour discovery call with the customer
- A custom job description is created for the role
- Their recruitment department looks for talent to match the job description
- They vet thousands of applicants, video resumes, and assessments
- They present the top one-to-five candidates to the client
- They facilitate interviews between each candidate and the client
- The client chooses and hires their favorite candidate
- Assistantly facilitates onboarding with the hired candidate, including meetings and tool setup
- Assistantly provides continuous support for the talent
As you can imagine, this takes a ton of back-and-forth communication and lots of project management overhead. Not only do they have to get all of the above done in a short timeframe, but they also have to make it feel like a breezy process along the way.
Before they found Dock, they managed all of this over email.
“I would say it was pretty much a duct-tape client experience prior to getting Dock.”
“We had a CRM, and we were using that to send emails. And I had been using Canva to create these long pages. And then we decided that, honestly, it didn't make sense. It wasn't intuitive enough.”
“It was taking up so much of our time that we needed to find a solution to be able to provide something that not only took care of our time and energy but also set our brand forward in our communications.”
“So we went out looking, and we actually found a few options out there, but none of them fit perfectly. And then we ran across Dock.”
Discovering Dock
“2023 was that moment where we were like, ‘We need to do something about client experience at Assistantly.’
“Both the CEO and I are very curious people. So we are always looking at the newest, latest, greatest apps and tools out there.
“I work with one of our clients to also do fractional CMO work for them. They're a real estate brokerage, and they were looking for an onboarding process for their agents. I ran across Dock, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is perfect.’”
“And so I created the whole [Dock workspace] in a single day. I gave it to the client and I can't tell you exactly what they said because it was full of swear words—like, ‘Holy cow, this is amazing.’
“It revolutionized the way they onboarded their agents in their brokerage so easily. And that's when we sat down with Alex and went through what Dock can do.”
1. Creating an on-brand client experience
Assistantly has a strong company brand and wanted that to carry through to the customer experience (check out their website—it’s awesome).
Prior to using Dock, Assistantly tried to do that by sharing PDF guides over email.
“Dock honestly flipped a switch for us, because we were using Canva to show off our brand to our clients.”
“But it wasn't intuitive. It wasn't clickable. You didn't have analytics. You didn't get measurements. And once we saw Dock, we instantaneously fell in love and then the journey started from there.”
Assistantly started out in Dock by creating a template their Client Experience team could use to send personalized follow-ups to each customer.
“When we first started using Dock, the shake-up was to make it look visually appealing, right? Make it feel like Assistantly. Make it feel like you were entering our world and we were going to help you inside of our world.”
Joyce said it only took them a few days to get their initial Dock template live.
“That originally took us a day or two. We're pretty quick at being able to infuse a little bit of extra into our communications and the way they look. Dock makes it easy.”
“Dock has some very specific spaces where you can infuse logos and brand identity. And that was super easy. We used Canva just to fill in those pieces that we couldn't get.”
Joyce also said the ability to embed their existing content into Dock helped speed up the setup.
“We have all kinds of presentations that are really overly branded, I would say, but do feel friendly and familiar to our clients. So using your Embed Everything really made a big difference.”
“Dock provided that hyper-personalized option for us to use in our client experience. And it also makes it intuitive for our clients.”
2. Speeding up follow-up for Client Success
“Once we got those templates done, giving the entire template to our Client Success team makes it easy,” said Joyce.
“When they meet on the strategy session with the client, the very next thing is for them to follow up with the Dock.”
“Since it's all really laid out and there are templates built for each thing, they can take those templates in and out of the Dock if they want to. They can also shut off pieces or pages that they don't need.”
“So the follow-up is super easy. It literally takes minutes versus hours.”
Joyce said Dock offers a great balance between templatization and personalization.
“The other thing that we have allowed space for in our Docks is allowing the client success team to personalize everything.”
“When you're done with that strategy session and your Dock is supposed to go out that same day, you have the option to add in the recording of the strategy session and then add in some bits and pieces about, you know, ‘Hey, it was really great to meet you,’ and, ‘I love dogs too,’ or whatever that personal interaction was—they can add that into Dock.
“I think this is really one of the biggest benefits of Dock—having the templates there for your client success team, or your sales team, or anybody else to use.”
Joyce also said it gives their Customer Experience team peace of mind to know whether or not customers are engaging with their follow-up.
“They can see their progress by looking at the analytics. Is the person opening it? I had a great conversation…”
3. Reducing customer questions
“I would say the exact moment we knew Dock was key to our business was when we stopped getting questions from our clients,” said Joyce.
“We stopped getting asked, ‘What are the next steps? How do I pay the hiring deposit? How do I find my talent?’”
“It's not that we didn't send them the next steps before. It's that they didn't pay attention to the email, or they didn't see the email. We have thousands of emails in our inbox every single day. It just was so confusing.”
"We would have to go back to them and say, ‘Check this email. Here's when it was sent.’”
“We knew instantly that Dock was the way to go when we stopped getting so many requests for next steps.”
At first, Joyce wasn’t sure whether their customers would ditch the familiarity of email and engage with their Dock workspaces.
“If people are concerned about whether their customers will use and appreciate Dock, we had that same concern. It's a lot of testing to make sure that they feel comfortable opening it. It's new to a lot of people. So many people have been doing business that old way.”
“But once you get them in the Dock, they absolutely love it.
“They even comment things like, ‘I can't believe this is so easy. I can't wait to implement this into my business.’”
Joyce recommends going the extra mile to get clients to open their Dock workspace.
“Infuse some sort of fun anecdote at the top of the email to get them lightened up and say, ‘Okay, I'm going to open this up and engage with it.’”
Joyce said Dock’s workspace analytics helped them test what was resonating most with clients.
“[Dock] just rolled out analytics per person that let you see who's opening them. That in and of itself is enough to tell you what works and what needs to be changed.”
“Once you create that original Dock, test and test again and keep looking at those at those analytics. Are people engaging with it? What part of it are they engaging with? Do you need to move up the next steps to the top of the Dock in order to get the best engagement?”
“Try different options with Dock and see which one resonates the most with your clients.”
4. Hyper-personalizing the sales experience
Because Dock has had such a big impact on Assistantly’s client experience, they’re now rolling it out into their sales process too.
They’re using Dock:
- As a landing page and lead magnet
- For personalized follow-up
- For affiliate partner enablement
“I built out a resource library,” said Joyce. “All of our resources are put into a single Dock and we share that as a lead magnet.”
Once a lead enters their funnel, Assistnatly sends a personalized Dock workspace with recommendations instead of a one-size-fits-all email sequence.
“When leads come in, we already have an idea of what they need. So instead of email dumping our clients, we're going to go straight to them with an option for a solution.”
“It's not as great as going through our strategy session, but we want to deliver personalized communication that delivers a solution right off the bat. ‘Here's somebody that would match your business and your talent. Here it is right here in this Dock,’ and then it follows with the next steps and resources.”
They also use their Dock resource library to upsell current customers. “Our team shares it whenever they have an option for providing additional value to our clients,” said Joyce. “That's been a really big game-changer.”
“We also do affiliate partnerships with business owners, coaches, and all of that. We use Dock to sell that partnership. Our entire affiliate experience is set up on Dock, from ‘get to know us’ and ‘become a partner’ to ‘next steps’. And it fully translates through that whole experience.”
Results
“All in all, we're choosing to use Dock in so many ways in our business that have increased our ability to meet our clients where they're at,” said Joyce.
Since adopting Dock, Assistantly has seen major time savings across the customer lifecycle. They have:
- Cut the Customer Success follow-up process by hours
- Saved each customer an estimated 5 hours of follow-up communication
- Created one smooth client experience—from Sales through to Success
“I think the biggest measurable impact is something that most people don't measure. It's digital debt,” said Joyce. “It literally takes the time and energy away from not only us and the client, but also our talent.”
“That's really the win-win in all of this when working with Dock. Dock makes things so seamless that we're able to give more to the client.”
“No longer are our clients asking us, ‘What are the next steps? Where do I find this guide? When does my person start?’”
“We have that all set up into our Dock now, and it has been a game changer in our client experience.”
“From the very beginning of sales until onboarding—I would say we're easily saving each customer a good five hours because we're not having those back-and-forth conversations.”
Joyce says Dock has also helped blur the lines between Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success to create one unified Assistantly customer experience.
“We truly feel like it's all client experience from the minute you step into our business or we're there to help you. As we've used Dock, those lines have blurred even more.”
“You are instantly connected with everything we have to offer—whether that's seeing our brand, or seeing our marketing, or seeing our resources. It's just one experience.”
Joyce says Dock’s multi-page workspaces have helped transition customers from one stage of the customer experience to the next.
“Now that you have pages, we've built that process into all of it. And that's where the blurred lines come in, right? We start with the sales [page] with the idea that this is the solution for you. And then we go into, here's our client experience. And these are all separate pages.”
“Prior to Dock, that was all separate emails and it got very confusing.”
“From the very beginning, from the moment you step into Assistantly, to the moment you leave—which hopefully is never—you will always see that Dock and you will always see the steps you went through to hire the person.”
“They just go straight to their Dock, and there it is. It really makes it super seamless and it's one link. So everybody gets to see their entire experience from start to finish.”
One Dock Tip
Assistantly has some of the nicest-looking Dock workspaces we’ve ever seen. So we asked Joyce if she has any tips for other Dock users.
“First of all, that was very nice to say that we have really great looking Docks,” said Joyce. “One of our goals was to make sure that whenever we sent a communication, that it looked and felt like Assistantly.”
“I would highly recommend infusing everybody's input at the company—especially Brand and Marketing to make those Docks really feel like you.”
“I would say to infuse your marketer, or your brand officer, or anybody that has some sort of talent in making things look appealing and personalized.”
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