Documoto learns new lessons with Smartsheet

For manufacturers and asset-intensive industries such as transit, mining, and construction, having the right equipment and parts available is vital to keeping their businesses up and running. The Documoto software-as-a-service (SaaS) interactive content management system digitizes the process of presenting, selling, and supporting machine and equipment parts.

Managing all this technical content requires clear and frequent communication with customers. Smartsheet helps Documoto manage the full range of customer communication and engagement, saving significant time and effort.

“Smartsheet significantly decreases the time it takes to communicate updates to our customers and manage the information they’re providing to us,” says Christa Bemis, director of the Professional Services team at Documoto.

“When we onboard new customers, we’re often delivering data migrations and integrations. If customers have defects they need to report during the implementation, we intake those via Smartsheet versus a customer success manager getting them via email and communicating them separately to a solution engineer. We can also associate that information to key project tasks in the project schedule for customers to track progress. It saves us time on a daily basis; we’re spending less time and resources trying to manage information.”

Before adopting Smartsheet, Bemis and her colleagues relied on SharePoint to share important information with customers and among internal teams. SharePoint could be difficult for new customers and colleagues to learn, and the process of adding new users to projects was often cumbersome for project managers who hadn’t fully mastered the software.

To get around the learning curve, team members turned to email and spreadsheets, but tracking updates and the most accurate version of data was overwhelming. They chose Smartsheet to provide a single place for tech staff and customer success teams to find the most current information.

Assessing customer health at a glance

One of Documoto’s most important sheets enables team members to measure customer health. The sheet tracks quantifiable details such as the number of support tickets, usage levels, and net promoter scores (NPS). If the numbers start to move beyond their optimal ranges, Smartsheet automatically alerts the customer success team’s Slack channel so success managers can find ways to solve customers’ problems and help them get more value from their solution.

“We’re able to report on customer health not just from our opinion on how customers are doing, but other metrics, and then take action on what we see,” Bemis says. “I think that helps our customers a lot, especially since some of these things aren’t tangible for us without these reports and these alerts.”

Documoto Academy: A customer-training framework

The company’s onboarding model was previously time-consuming and required extensive coordination when training new customers on how to use their technology. Documoto knew that its time-intensive process needed to be streamlined, without losing any of the instructional value that customers need.

“Implementing our customers was a high-touch process, and one of the longest portions of that process was training,” says Andi Kirtland, Customer Success Manager Team Lead. “To onboard a new customer, we would spend anywhere from eight to 16 hours training customers by live-demoing within our application. So for every customer, we had a single resource spending a considerable amount of time to deliver training materials.”

Then Kirtland and Bemis attended some sessions on dashboards at the Smartsheet ENGAGE customer conference and realized they had the resources they needed to create a self-service training portal. With guidance from their Smartsheet customer support team, Kirtland and her colleagues created Documoto Academy.

Documoto Academy encompasses training resources that are housed within Smartsheet dashboards, such as videos, screenshots, process diagrams, and step-by-step instructions. Customers can take quizzes built on Smartsheet forms; submitting a questionnaire triggers an email to the customer with an answer key and additional information. Customers can work through modules at their own pace on their schedule, without being tied to a trainer’s meeting calendar.

“We’re now seeing that, depending on their availability, our customers can train in one week, where previously it was taking us anywhere from four to six weeks,” Kirtland says. “The self-service training tool has enabled us to dramatically decrease the amount of time we need to spend onboarding our customers. When we meet with them, we’re able to have a more interactive working session that involves sharing best practices for their particular use case.”

Not only does Documoto Academy help customers realize value from their solution more quickly, it expands Documoto’s ability to grow. Customer success managers who previously could only support 10 accounts are now successfully supporting as many as 20 accounts, and Bemis expects that number to rise to 30 within the year.

Documoto can grow its customer base without having to hire more staff. Best of all, the Smartsheet-based training program didn’t require a hefty investment.

“Before we implemented Documoto Academy, we were looking at other e-learning tools that would have taken up a large portion of our budget,” Kirtland says. “Because Smartsheet was already a part of our other processes involving our CRM system, we didn’t need to purchase another tool. This helped us save a considerable amount in costs.”

Planning and reporting marketing projects

Documoto also uses Smartsheet to manage its marketing planning and analytics. With Smartsheet, Marketing Manager Miki Noble can coordinate event budgeting and track execution. In addition, she uses Smartsheet to track campaign performance metrics that are used for executive and board member reporting. Bemis and her team use Smartsheet for customer reporting as well, providing data in a format that customers are familiar with.

“I was surprised to see how many of our customers use Smartsheet,” Bemis says. “We’ll send them our project sheets, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, you use Smartsheet? Can you share it with me?’ That’s been surprising for us. And it’s been nice because you don’t have to train them at all — they’re all experts.”