Rocketlane

I used Rocketlane  to track onboarding project plans for large customers. I used Rocketlane  for both templatized and bespoke project plans that we put together for our clients. I also used it for reporting capabilities to track utilization from our onboarding managers as well as reporting on our onboarding timelines and milestones.

For some of our large enterprise customers, we would show Rocketlane to that customer in the pre-sales process to demonstrate how detailed our project planning would be. Once that customer converted, we would spin up a template project plan based off of our different onboarding offerings. We then used Rocketlane as our source of truth for project management for that customer. That customer had access to Rocketlane to view the current timelines and milestones related to their onboarding journey, and we kept that project plan updated throughout the implementation.

I had Rocketlane integrated with a couple of different systems. We integrated Rocketlane with Salesforce  so that it synced in data from Salesforce  to make the project plans bespoke to the plan that the customer had purchased. They also synced back fields from Rocketlane to Salesforce so that we could run more customized reports out of Salesforce with our CRM  data, and then we eventually would plug in that data into Omni  for reporting purposes.

The best features Rocketlane offers are the client portal, which allowed the customer to view the current status of the project. I could assign ownership of certain tasks and milestones to the client to ensure that they understood who was accountable on their side for completing tasks throughout the project. The time tracking was really important for us to help understand utilization for our team members.

Rocketlane has positively impacted my organization by allowing our onboarding managers to view themselves as project management experts. It gave them tooling that was specific to their craft and allowed them to develop skill sets outside of just their product knowledge itself. It gave them a framework for how to think about projects more holistically. It also gave them the ability to look at their book of business with deep insights coming from Rocketlane.

One thing that my team is looking for right now is the ability to integrate other communication systems such as Zendesk  with Rocketlane. That is one of the reasons I have not purchased it in my current role. We are in a world where there are many different communication and collaboration tools, and trying to centralize the communication and fit it within the framework of these projects to meet customers where they are right now is a challenge that Rocketlane is not quite solving.

There is a little bit of app slowness with Rocketlane, but generally it worked really well for my team.

Rocketlane is not a perfect ten for me because there are two key feature requests I have. One is timestamped notes; tracking developments and customer communications over time is really important for me in the onboarding process. There is a notes field, but I would want the notes to be able to be timestamped so that we can track changes in sentiment. The other key thing is that there were no required fields; it was really important for us if we closed out an onboarding project to have certain fields on that object be mandatory to be completed. They had a couple workarounds for this, but I always wanted it to be a required field, as it does in CRM , as it helps keep our data super clean.

I am not a current user, but in my past two roles, I used Rocketlane for about four years.

I believe customers responded well to being able to see their project status and task assignments directly in Rocketlane, as it provided them visibility. I do not think they interacted with it much, but it was very important to give them the visibility into what they needed to complete and accomplish on their side. It helped us drive timelines and helped drive accountability by showing the customer what they were directly responsible for during the onboarding process. We could always point back to the project plan if deadlines or timelines slipped, which helped us have very clear ideas around who was responsible for those things if those deadlines ever did slip. It was not the majority of the customers who interacted with Rocketlane projects wholeheartedly, but it was an important mechanism for our team.

My CSAT was always pretty high, but Rocketlane helped us retain high CSAT even as our customer base grew. We definitely saw improvements in time to value, as we were able to move customers through onboarding a little bit quicker because we were able to orient around the dates that we were tracking in Rocketlane. As I mentioned earlier, it also allowed us to track utilization per onboarding manager, which outside of time tracking is very difficult or relies on self-reporting.

It is most helpful to be able to connect into Salesforce data with Rocketlane, so you will need a Salesforce admin who can sync in the proper data that you want to be able to view in Rocketlane or sync back data from Rocketlane into Salesforce for your reporting capabilities. Otherwise, it is a pretty easy setup. I would also be aware of the full customization options on the client portal side and try to reduce that down to what is necessary for the client to be able to see in their own portal. I would rate this product an eight overall.