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Frontify is a leading brand management platform that combines digital asset management, brand guidelines, and templates into a collaborative source of brand truth.  

With a global team structure, Frontify has around 40-50 Customer Success Managers (CSMs) working remotely from various locations including New York, UK, and Switzerland, to serve different customer segments.

We spoke with John Gasper, who primarily oversees the customer onboarding experience, and EMEA growth team at Frontify. He walked us through the two major objectives they are pursuing.
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1. Develop a standardized onboarding process: Frontify sought to establish a standardized onboarding process that could be put into motion across global teams, to maintain a uniform quality for all customers.
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2. Improve customer visibility: Frontify aimed to gain clear visibility of each customer's status in the onboarding process. This increased visibility would allow for better planning, communication, and predictability of go-live times.

“You would go around and ask, how does onboarding work at Frontify? And the answer was always, it depends. Yes, every customer is different, but that doesn't mean we cannot have a standardized process to support their onboarding. That’s the only way we can ensure any type of quality in what we do”

However, they encountered several challenges due to their current onboarding system being split between spreadsheets and emails.

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The Challenge
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Lack of process standardization

‍A key issue was the lack of an official, standardized onboarding process. Each time, a new process was uniquely designed based on the customer's needs. Without a formal process, the onboarding experience was not uniform, leading to inconsistency in the quality of the onboarding experience provided to different customers.
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"It was a bit messy and really not very consistent."

Unorganized and inefficient tools

‍The absence of a centralized tool resulted in a messy mix of multiple tools like email, spreadsheets, and free online tools for managing onboarding. This absence of a single, unified platform led to inefficiencies and communication gaps.
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"When it comes to onboarding, the customer journey was pretty much like a black hole."

Lack of customer accountability and visibility

‍There was a lack of accountability from customers due to the absence of a clear onboarding process. Customers seemed to vanish into a "black hole" after signing up, only to reappear as active customers after several months. This made tracking the customer's progress through the onboarding process difficult, leading to unpredictability in go-live times.

Tedious manual updates hindered efficiency

‍The onboarding plan, entirely mapped out on spreadsheets, made implementing customer change requests a tedious process. Any changes required manual adjustments to every dependency within the Google spreadsheet. For example, if a customer decided to alter their go-live date, it necessitated a total rework of the spreadsheet. This process was not only inefficient but also extremely time-consuming.‍

No tool for measuring customer satisfaction

‍A significant gap was the absence of tools to measure customer satisfaction in their onboarding process. Without a uniform process or system in place, it was challenging to measure how the customers felt about their onboarding experience. This meant that they were unable to gather valuable insights that could have helped improve their onboarding process.

Frontify was searching for a solution to help them design a structured onboarding process, track and measure its effectiveness, and also provide their customers with a clear roadmap of their journey.

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The Solution

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‍”The way we start onboarding with customers is kind of effortless now”

Process standardization

‍Rocketlane enabled Frontify to design a standard process using easy-to-setup templates, enabling the creation of a consistent and measurable onboarding journey. This ensured quality and consistency across the organization.
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“Our CSMs tend to talk about how things are a lot easier, much more efficient, they're able to save a lot of time.”

Streamline task management

‍Rocketlane's platform facilitated efficient task management and tracking, saving time and boosting productivity among the CSMs. Instead of dealing with chaotic spreadsheets, the CSMs now had a single place to track everything related to onboarding tasks, incorporate customer requests, and templatize communications.

Enhanced customer visibility

‍Frontify gained the ability to predict their customers' onboarding progress, thanks to end-to-end visibility of task progress. This ensured they were always a step ahead in their planning and communications.

Customer satisfaction tracking

‍By implementing CSAT forms, Frontify was able to collect valuable feedback at different stages of the customer's journey, not just in hindsight. This feedback helped identify areas for improvement in their onboarding process and allowed them to maintain a consistent pulse on customer sentiments.
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"One of the biggest transformations we saw in our customer success team was the ability to shape our journey with customers and make it much more consistent."