Learn how Brittany Soinski, Manager of Onboarding at Loom, uses Dock to speed up customer onboarding.
Overview
Here’s the TL;DR:
Challenge: Loom’s onboarding process is their best chance to drive customer adoption, expansion, and renewal for larger accounts. For Loom’s Customer Success team, effective onboarding means empowering their customer admins and champions with onboarding guides and checklists. Loom was previously using spreadsheets and project management tools to work with customers, but these tools were time-consuming to set up, and they weren’t effective at engaging customers.
Solution: Loom uses Dock to create personalized onboarding workspaces for each customer. They use Dock to embed onboarding content, share implementation checklists, summarize meeting notes, lead their champions through change management, and track engagement with the onboarding process.
Results: Loom customers who engage with their Dock workspaces during onboarding have 20% higher seat allocation and 10% higher active users compared to those that don’t. And by using Loom and Dock together, Loom has been able to move many of their onboarding activities to async—saving about 2 hours per customer during onboarding.
“The first time we showed Dock to a customer on our very first call—I'll never forget—our customer said, ‘Wow, what is this tool? If you showed this to every customer pre-sale, you'd close way more deals.’”
The Challenge
Brittany Soinski has spent the last five years building customer success enablement programs at Wrike, Mural, and now Loom.
When Brittany joined Loom, her first priority was improving Loom’s scaled customer onboarding process.
“When I first started at Loom, I solely focused on building out and revamping our onboarding program. That's the time we really have to make an impact and set the stage for the rest of the customer journey all the way through to renewal.
“Our research shows that if we can get people on this adoption curve during the onboarding period—within the first 30 or 60 days—they're going to see long-term success and renew with our tool. It's really hard to re-activate or re-onboard somebody down the line.”
While revamping their onboarding program, Brittany had to keep two audiences in mind:
- Their customers: “We’re creating programs that enable them to find success with Loom.”
- Their CS team: “My other role is teaching our customer success team how to enable our customers.”
“I'm always straddling those two roles and trying to find the happy medium.”
One big challenge for Brittany was finding an onboarding tool that provided value to both audiences.
“When thinking about tooling, I had to find something that was both effective for our customers, but also a really low lift for our CSMs. I didn't want to bring on a tool that was going to be a heavy lift for anyone to learn.”
When picking an onboarding tool, Brittany had four problems she was trying to solve:
- Getting customers to engage with their onboarding resources
- Educating admins to drive product adoption
- Enabling change management
- Improving time-to-value with more self-serve resources
Here’s how Brittany and Loom solved these challenges with Dock.
1. Sharing onboarding resources with customers
Brittany’s first weeks at Loom were spent creating must-have onboarding resources, such as 101 webinars and how-to guides for admins. But that only exacerbated another problem.
“We had best-in-class resources, but what's the best way to get them to our customers? It's really hard to find the right centralized place to house those.”
When Brittany joined Loom, they were using spreadsheets to onboard customer admins and check off tasks.
“Spreadsheets are lacking the really important visual element. We didn't have a way to embed a Loom in there. We couldn't visually tell our story. Our research at Loom shows that hyperlinking somewhere is not effective. Embedding a video can increase your clickthrough rate on any of your content by quite a lot. We were really doing ourselves a disservice by not having our visual content front and center.”
Brittany’s first instinct was to replace their onboarding spreadsheet with a Notion workspace for each customer. And while Loom’s team is a big fan of Notion for internal use cases, Brittany quickly found it limiting for working with customers.
“Project management software is great for keeping track of a project, but they’re too heavy when you're trying to get a customer to adopt your own software.”
“When you're building an onboarding program, you don't want to have to teach your customers another tool in order to onboard them into your tool.”
Then, Brittany found Dock.
“A colleague of mine was familiar with this tool called Dock. He was trying to show it to me for months and I was like, ‘I'm too busy to look at tools!’
“Finally, I sat down and looked at Dock and had this huge aha moment of, ‘Oh my gosh, this is the perfect place to take everything I have built and so seamlessly put it into this tool.’”
Loom’s Customer Success teams got started with Dock by creating a workspace template for each of their onboarding tracks.
“It was so easy for me to set up. Since you integrate with Loom, we were able to take all of our existing content and put it right into the Dock workspace. It worked beautifully right away. Whereas if I was trying to take all of this and put it into a project management tool and teach my team how to use that…” (Brittany trailed off)
“Everyone was very happy the day we said we're gonna stop using spreadsheets.”
Now, Loom’s team just has to copy one of their Dock workspace templates and lightly personalize it for each new customer.
“We use Dock to onboard all of our new customers. We're able to launch a new onboarding for a new customer in about 10 seconds, and it's fully customized. It saves us a ton of time and we're able to start working right away—whereas it previously took us 15-30 minutes to create a custom Notion hub.”
2. Educating admins to drive adoption
According to Brittany, “Engaged admins are key to engaged users and driving adoption.”
“Our role in customer success during onboarding as opposed to product-led onboarding is really partnering with our admins to make sure the account is set up for success.
“We're working with our admins on the technical setup. ‘Here’s the order you need to set things up. Here’s how to consolidate your workspaces. Here’s how to turn on your SSO.
“We're providing a lot of information for them, so the onboarding period is a really important time that we both educate them and enable them to be able to administer their workspace moving forward.”
Loom’s CS team uses Dock to walk admins through every step of onboarding.
“The first thing we do is record a pre-watch Loom where we introduce them to the Dock workspace. We show them everything we're going to be going through during onboarding, and then we link the Dock template in our Loom call to action button.”
“We see a pretty good conversion rate of people clicking in and poking around onboarding before we even get started.”
“Then we use Dock on the first kickoff call with the customer—our Joint Success Planning call. We give them an overview of onboarding and align on what they want their onboarding journey to look like and what success ultimately looks like for them.”
“It's really nice to be able to show them everything we're going to be doing together visually in the Dock onboarding template. And I'm able to take notes and edit on the fly.”
“After our first call, I embed the recording from that call into the Dock template. Now everything is buttoned up really nicely in this really easy-to-use and easy-to-share package.”
Another bonus of using Dock: no more slide decks for customer calls.
“We've also been able to totally replace using slide decks. I hate slide decks and I am thrilled that nobody on my team has had to prepare one since we started using Dock.”
3. Enabling change management
“One of the secrets to effective change management is communicating early and often. Our job in customer success is to package everything up really easily to help our admins, champions, and stakeholders to communicate this change effectively.”
“It's so important to create something that is shareable.”
“We want to make it really easy for our admins and champions to tell our story. It's much more effective coming from them than it is from us. So during onboarding, we're very focused on enabling them to enable their own teams.”
As part of their onboarding process, Loom uses Dock to house their change management resources.
“At the beginning of onboarding, we always tell our customers, ‘Hey, we know exactly what it takes to get your organization to adopt this new way of working. Put your trust in us, follow our process, and we will give you the tools you need to bring the rest of your org along for this journey.’"
Brittany shared some examples of change management resources they include in their Dock workspace.
“We have a sample communication plan built out where we say:
- ‘Here are the five times you're going to communicate at your org.’
- ‘Here's who should send the message. Here's what it should say. Here's the channel you should share it in. Here's how long it should be.’
- ‘Here are some really effective talking points when you are introducing Loom to your organization and this new way of working.’; and
- ‘Here are some values and benefits to communicate.’”
Having a single source of truth in the form of a Dock workspace makes it much easier for Loom’s team to embed their product within an organization’s way of working.
4. Improving TTV with asynchronous onboarding
Loom is the asynchronous video tool for work. Reducing meetings is built into their value proposition. So it was important to Brittany for this to be reflected in their onboarding programs as well.
“We're always going to have customers who prefer white glove, meeting-heavy onboarding, and we have a program built for that too. But as we were evaluating onboarding, one thing that was really important for us to improve was our time to value.”
“We started with this question of how might we onboard our customers faster, get them on this activation curve, and to value quicker?”
“What we did was we laid out all the steps of onboarding. We looked at how we were currently doing them—‘Okay, this one is a 60-minute meeting. It takes us about 30 minutes to prepare.’—And we started asking, ‘Could we move any of these to async?’
Dock helped Loom transform many of their onboarding meetings into asynchronous resources or checklists—helping their customers see faster time to value while saving time for Loom’s CS team.
“We wanted to make it really easy to package everything up. We know that at a drop of a hat, we can share a Dock template. It has all of our evergreen Loom content in here, and for our customers who really want to be self-serve, everything is fully ready to go.”
“Now, in our onboarding guide in Dock, we have the steps of onboarding listed out, and under each, we started asking our customers, ‘Would you like to do this async or would you like to have a meeting?’
“This is a really good way to instantly show our value during onboarding. We’ll say, ‘We're gonna do this asynchronously so that we can save us all 60 minutes from hopping on a meeting to walk through your workspace settings. We've prerecorded this. You can watch this at 1.5 speed."
Results
Using Dock, Loom has improved both of their North Star metrics for onboarding success:
- Seat allocation: the number of user licenses allocated within a certain period of time
- Seat activation: the number of users who record their first Loom and share it out
“Through our research and being able to track open rates and engagement in Dock, we’ve proven that when a customer engages with Dock, we have seen a 20% higher seat allocation than those that don't.”
“So that's automatically huge.”
“The other thing that's really exciting is higher seat activation. Our customers who engage with Dock during the onboarding period have a 10% higher number of active users during the onboarding period than those that don't.”
“For the first email in our scaled onboarding sequence—the only goal is to get them to open the Dock onboarding template. We know there is so much value there.”
Loom has also achieved major time savings during onboarding.
“It used to take us so long to launch a new onboarding for a customer. First, we'd have to get their Google sheet ready with all of their admin pieces. Then we would need to record a couple of Looms custom for them and link them in the spreadsheet.”
“If we wanted to use something a little more visual like a Notion template, Notion formatting's got a learning curve and it can take a little while to do. It previously took us 15-30 minutes to create a custom Notion hub.”
“Now, with Dock, it only takes us about 10 to 20 seconds to launch a new customer. I just type in their name, and all of a sudden we have this fully personalized template just for them ready to go.”
“Dock saves us a good two hours per customer to just launch an onboarding.”
Another benefit has been the impact on the pre-sale process.
“The first time we showed Dock to a customer on our first onboarding call—I'll never forget—our customer said, "Wow, what is this tool? If you showed this to every customer pre-sale, you'd close way more deals."
I said, "Oh, I think we're gonna have to purchase it after hearing that."
“So one thing we've started doing is using Dock during the presale cycle. One of our AEs will tap in our CS team when they're getting close to closing a deal.
“We know with confidence that if we can hop on a call and show them their custom Dock workspace—it's got their name and all the resources—we're able to really confidently say, ‘Hey, we have a best-in-class onboarding ready to go for you. It's gonna be totally customized for you. We know exactly what it takes to get you guys wildly successful with Loom, and we've made it really easy for you to do.’”
“Dock has been really effective at showing people visually, even before close of deal, what our onboarding looks like and how we are going to partner with them.”
“Prospects are always like, ‘Can you send this to us?’ And we're like, ‘We'll send it to you after you sign the deal.’”
One Dock Tip
Here’s Brittany’s number one tip for using Dock:
“My one tip for making Dock super successful for onboarding is embedding videos. Where I've really seen the magic happen in our onboarding is by pairing together our beautiful Dock onboarding with Loom videos.
“We just relaunched our scaled onboarding, and what we've done is we've recorded a quick two-minute overview in a Loom and we've embedded that in the Dock.
“We use this to introduce ourselves, add a human face and voice to this experience—even though this is for our scaled customers who we're not working with in a white-glove manner.
“But by having a video, we have found that our customers have been much more engaged with the tool and with all of the steps during onboarding.”
One Onboarding Tip
Here’s Brittany’s best onboarding advice:
“My biggest tip for those trying to create a best-in-class onboarding is to move anything that is a one-way dissemination of information into an async tool, such as a Loom video, so that you can really make the best use of the live time you do have together.
“Evaluate what you are currently doing and ask yourself:
- What am I doing that is repeatable?
- What are the questions I'm answering over and over?
- What are the trainings I'm leading over and over?
“Where you can really see the time savings snowball is by taking the time to build evergreen content that can be reused and resurfaced over and over and over again any time a customer has a question.
“Have different tracks available—different strokes for different folks. Our IT admins, for example, don't want to hop on a 60-minute call with us to walk through workspace settings. So we pre-record a walkthrough of everything they need to know.
“As an enterprise admin, they can watch that in 1.5X speed. We don't have to meet live to do that. We can then meet live later to do a Q&A.
“This lets you reserve the live time you do have with your customers to talk about things that they want to talk about. You can use the live time you have to ask questions, do discovery, or take the conversation in the direction that your stakeholders want to take it.”
Onboard customers faster with Dock
Here's a quick walkthrough of how to onboard customers with Dock:
If also you're also ready to ditch spreadsheets and project management tools to better-support your customers, book a demo or try Dock for free.
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