How Robin sped up customer implementations with Dock

What started as a small project to simplify Robin’s onboarding process ended up centralizing their entire customer experience in one place.

Overview

Here’s the TL;DR:

‍Challenge: Robin’s Sales, Sales Engineering, and Onboarding teams have to collaborate closely to tailor their workplace management platform to each customer's technical requirements. To speed up implementation, they needed a better way to pass information between teams and keep customers informed throughout their evaluation and onboarding journey.

‍Solution: Robin uses a single, centralized Dock workspace to manage each customer’s journey from sales to renewal. Sales creates a deal room workspace for each qualified prospect, where they can loop in Sales Engineering for the technical evaluation. Once the deal closes, the Onboarding team can present a clear implementation plan from the same workspace.

‍Results: With Dock, Robin has gained full visibility into the entire customer relationship. They can easily pass on timely and accurate information between teams as deals progress, and their customers always have one place to go for information. As a result, Robin has cut their implementation timeline to just one month—while maintaining high CSAT scores. 

“I don't know how many times I've been DMed in Slack the words, ‘I love Dock.’” - Noah Massucci, Director of Sales Engineering and Customer Onboarding, Robin

The Challenge

Robin is a workplace management platform that helps companies make better use of their office spaces—an especially tricky problem for companies with multiple offices, flexible work weeks, and hybrid workforces.

But what makes Robin a great product—its ability to plug into a company’s physical offices— also makes it a technical challenge to sell and implement.

Noah Massucci is Robin’s Director of Sales Engineering and Customer Onboarding. 

His technical presale team is tapped in during the sales process to help customers with their technical evaluation and address technical or security concerns before the deal closes and customers are passed off to his onboarding team.

“What led me to Dock was actually an extended onboarding cycle,” said Noah. “We were taking too long to get people implemented and we were trying to dissect what was going on there—and it really started even before they were customers.”

For example, not getting a customer’s office maps during the sales process has the potential to slow down implementation.

“If you're asking for their map at the kickoff, it's already too late. We're losing time there.”

Here’s how Robin created a smoother implementation process with Dock.

1. Onboarding visibility

Noah first came to Dock laser-focused on making Robin’s onboarding process clearer for their customers and their own teams.

“We had just gone through a couple of onboarding cycles where the biggest piece of [client] feedback was understanding where we're at in onboarding because they didn't have that shared plan. As soon as I saw that [in Dock], I was like, ‘Oh, this is great.’”

Robin’s customers go through a three-stage onboarding process of kickoff, training, and launch—each with its own list of steps. 

“To me, it almost looks like a giant Gantt chart that can get really confusing really fast,” said Noah. “You have to track each little thing that needs to happen to get through those three sections of onboarding.”

“Before Dock, that was happening all over the place, within our CRM, within Excel—some people had Google Docs. We needed more of a shared plan so the customer could really buy in and get into the onboarding and feel like they were contributing to [the plan] as well.”

“I got in touch with Joey at Dock for a demo, and immediately I was like, ‘this is really cool.’” 

Noah said Dock was an instant hit with his Onboarding team.

“We started out with a template for onboarding that was really focused on ‘Here are the stages of onboarding. Here are the tasks that go into onboarding. Here are some videos and helpful links, and how to track if we were going to finish by the deadline.’”

“The feedback from the team was immediately like, ‘It's nice. I just create a Dock. I have the checklist for the shared project plan. I can track to our goal on it. If I need to add more information or more items to the list, I can just do it in Dock. And I don't have to worry about how I send this to them, or if they’re seeing it.”

Noah said Dock’s project plans and timelines instantly created more visibility for Robin’s customers.

“The first thing that caught my eye was the project list,” said Noah. “The fact you could tie it to the different stages and see, ‘Hey, you're halfway there’ or ‘You're three-quarters of the way there’ was so awesome, because it helped our team track it, but more than anything, it helped the customer be on the same page with us and understand if we’re going to hit those goals and deadlines we had talked about in the kickoff.”

Noah clearly remembered the first time he realized Dock was working.

“I opened up Dock, I went to the reports and could see every customer in onboarding, how many there were, and how many were finishing on time. That's how I knew it was working.”

Noah said it’s helped his Onboarding team have more meaningful conversations with customers. 

"The idea that we can see what they've clicked on has been huge because the idea that, 'Hey, You need to take these steps to be able to hit your deadline' is really important. If they aren't taking those steps, we know now."

“The visibility for our team into what the customer is doing, and are they holding up their side of the bargain, and are we holding up ours has been really nice.”

2. Centralized cross-team collaboration

Once Noah had more visibility into onboarding, he realized many of their onboarding challenges came from team-to-team handoffs, both pre- and post-sale.

“A typical challenge for our presale Sales Engineering team is they're getting involved after conversations have happened,” said Noah. “They're trying to catch up and understand: Who is this person I'm talking to? What are their goals? Why are they interested in Robin? What type of role do I need to play in the conversation?”

“That information is so valuable because it allows our team to be seen as experts. It up levels that conversation so that we can not only just talk about the product functionality but also the impact of implementing and integrating Robin with your current systems.”

Noah said this information used to be tough to come by.

“Before Dock, we were jumping between a bunch of different systems to get the full picture. Dock was our way of putting something in place to centralize that entire experience.”

"The initial rollout of Dock was supposed to be really focused on the onboarding, but when we gave it to Sales, they instantly were like, 'What is this? This is cool. Give me that.'"

“They started to build out these deal rooms, where now we use this for almost every deal that comes in. Our sales team is creating these presentations and tracking the information they're sharing with the prospects.”

“That's really been helpful for the Sales Engineering team because they can jump in and understand what we've been talking about. If the customer has taken any steps already, they can track that.”

This visibility extends into the rest of the customer lifecycle, says Noah.

“What's great is all that information stays in Dock. So when it comes to onboarding, not only do we present the onboarding piece of it, but we have all the information that [Sales] has collected beforehand, tying that together better than I thought it would.”

“And it just kind of caught like wildfire from there,” said Noah. “Immediately, CSMs were also like, ‘Can I use that? I would love to use that for quarterly business reviews.’ They loved having the insight down to the task level. They can really feel like they're tracking every little detail of the onboarding piece and knowing how that experience is going without always having to be part of that conversation.”

“Now we have Product getting involved, creating content, and giving it to us. Product Marketing is using it. We have Enablement using it.”

"So [Dock]'s been kind of a do-it-all all tool that's replaced probably a lot of different [tools]—I can't even name all of them. But it's really centralized a lot of our internal processes that I didn't anticipate it would."

“That, I think, helped us understand what each team really needed. We uncovered different pain points from different teams of like, ‘Hey, this is what I'm missing when I get involved. This is what I would love to see when I want to come in on an onboarding call.’

3. One consistent customer experience

Noah says Dock has given Robin’s customers one unified experience—no matter which team they’re working with.

"We wanted to set a consistent experience from the moment they talk to Sales and the Sales Engineer all the way to the onboarding team, so they felt like everyone was connected and communicating."

“It comes off much differently when you know we have the information you've been giving people versus when someone gets on a call, and it's almost like the first time you're talking to that company.”

“We first start using Dock with a prospect in the presales cycle. Once we've qualified them, our sales reps are creating a Dock [workspace] where they're putting in content to help sell, but also to set the stage for further conversations.”

“From there, we'll take that private [workspace tab] and make it public and say, ‘Okay, now you have access to all the onboarding information’ and it’s a seamless introduction to your onboarding team.”

“They're just going to the same place and they know the information will live there.”

4. A repeatable but flexible sales process

Noah says Dock has brought consistency to their sales process without forcing their team into a one-size-fits-all pitch.

“Everyone has their own style in sales, right? Some people take great notes. Some people are more like, ‘I want to talk it through.’ It's really hard to understand where the information is going to live.”

“So when we implemented Dock, myself and our Head of Enablement went in and started creating base templates to give people an idea of what you can do. We got Product Marketing and Product involved and created the libraries and made sure we had all the content that the Sales team would want.”

“But the idea was to give them flexibility because the pitch can't be the same all the time. We have to cater it to the use case and the workflow that we're trying to solve for.”

“So giving reps and sales leaders the ability to customize those templates and really customize the pitch based off of the information we've collected and what that customer is trying to solve for has been huge. The Sales team loves that.” 

“What's great is we can also track what [the customer] looked at on an RFP so we can be like, ‘Oh they seem to be really like this. So maybe we should focus on that.’"

“I don't know how many times I've been DMed in Slack the words, ‘I love Dock,’ and it's because we've given them the ability to create this stuff, and it's all in one area, and it's so easy to do.”

"They feel like it's amazing to have something like Dock to send to a prospect, where it can present all this information in a clean way. Our sales team has really been enjoying it."

Results

With Dock, Robin has seen:

• Faster customer implementations
• Consistently high CSAT scores
• Timely and accurate handoffs between their GTM teams
• One consistent client experience

Noah said Dock has drastically cut down Robin’s onboarding timeline without impacting their high CSAT scores.

“Our implementation timeline, in particular, is way down,” said Noah.

“When I was thinking about moving forward, I anchored myself on, ‘If I implement Dock, the first thing I want to look at is our implementation timelines and are we shortening those and are we still delivering a good experience?’”

“The thing that's really been great is, yes, we've shortened them—right now they're sitting a little bit over a month long, which is a big win for us—but also we've maintained a very high customer satisfaction score.”

“So we're not only shortening the timeline, but we're still delivering a good experience, which to me, is the ultimate goal of implementing a solution here for the onboarding team.”

Noah says Dock has also unlocked a lot of visibility in their sales process—both for their team and for their customers.

“For the sales process, the thing that's been really nice is the collaboration among all the teams to make sure that we are giving that prospect who's thinking about going forward with Robin the full picture of what we can do for them by allowing everything to be centralized.”

"We're presenting [the client] with the most timely and accurate information. That in itself has been hugely impactful and something that I wanted Dock to do, but I didn't think it would do it this quickly."

One Dock Tip

We always ask customers for their best Dock tip. Noah says you get exponentially more value out of Dock when you use it across the customer lifecycle.

“Don't be afraid to cast a wide net with [Dock] when you implement it,” said Noah. “That was the biggest aha moment for me after we implemented.”

“I was so focused on onboarding that I don't think I really sat back and looked at how this thing can glue together the entire customer journey. Now, I see Dock as a customer journey tool, where we want the customer to use this from day one all the way to the renewal.”

“From the ability to customize the templates to hide certain tabs… And then we're already starting to implement things like security review access, where you create the security page template [in Dock], and allow people to get access to an NDA, our pen tests, our certifications, all of that...”

“This really can be a way to consistently give your customers a great experience while keeping everyone internally consistent, using the same product.”

One Presales Tip

We also asked Noah for advice he has for other presales engineers. 

“I talk a lot about this with my team when they first onboard: being comfortable in the uncomfortable and understanding that you're not always going to have an answer in this role.”

“You want to have the answer, and you want to be that go-to person, but sometimes being comfortable in the unknown is the way you're going to build respect.”

“People will respect when you can confidently tell them, ‘Hey, I will get back to you with an answer.’

“When you do that, you start to embrace the role itself in a way. You're ultimately a problem solver, and there's not always an answer. So you’ve got to find it.”

“As soon as you accept that, you let go of the expectations that you had to always have that answer. You start to become a really strong technical resource.”