Customer Success is all about building strong relationships with your clients to ensure their needs are met and they continue seeing value in your product or service. But this relationship can’t just be a one-way street. To get the best results, you need to collaborate with your customers to accomplish their goals, share valuable insights, and build trust and loyalty. 

The old reliable calls and meetings are a good starting point, but to make customer collaboration even more effective today, you need a shared workspace — this is where Vitally Docs come in. 

With Docs, you can create shared documents that dynamically pull in Vitally data and project information, making it easy to personalize the experience for each individual customer. And unlike other collaboration tools, Vitally Docs always connect back to your customer data, delivering unprecedented efficiency and transparency for everyone involved. 

To streamline your CS operations and save time, Vitally users can create Docs as Templates that can be generated automatically for every customer — learn more about how to create Doc Templates in this help article.

Let’s go over a few ways teams can use Docs to enhance collaboration and deepen customer relationships in Vitally.

Share Onboarding Goals and Initiatives

One of the best ways to use a Vitally Doc is to create and share a customer’s onboarding plan. In this type of Doc, you can outline:

• The responsibilities of your team and the customer
• Milestones you want the customer to reach during onboarding
• The customer’s overall business goals 
• Important points of contact at both your business and theirs
• Tasks they need to complete during the onboarding process 

Include any resources that will be helpful in onboarding, such as educational videos or slideshows, which can be embedded directly into the Doc. 

To truly personalize the experience , you can easily embed account variables, like the customer’s plan type and the account owner’s name, to further contextualize your Doc. 

To work through onboarding collaboratively, you can create an onboarding Project in Vitally with a series of milestones and tasks that the customer needs to complete — then, embed this project directly into the Doc so you and your customer can work through it together. Best of all? Once you share the Doc with your customer, the Project will automatically be created.

As they check off tasks, they’ll see their progress in real-time, motivating them to continue their onboarding and get closer to seeing true value from your product or service.  This also reduces the time spent going back-and-forth via calls or email, enabling onboarding to continuously progress in real-time. 

Create a Shared Workspace for a Feature Release

Releasing a new product or feature can be a stressful time for Customer Success teams. There are bound to be plenty of questions streaming in from customers using the feature for the first time, which can overwhelm CS folks who are already strapped for time. 

Get ahead of the questions and concerns by creating a Feature Release or Beta Program Doc that you can share with your customers proactively. This can include:

• FAQs about the product 
• Steps to using the product 
• Procedure for gaining access to the product 
• How to give feedback on the product 

Below, you’ll see an example of a Beta Program User Kickoff Doc used by our own Product Team.

In Vitally Docs, you have the ability to include editable variables, like the “Feedback” field you see in this Doc. Instead of emailing feedback to their Customer Success point of contact and cluttering their inbox, customers can input their feedback directly into the Doc. That information is automatically synced back to Vitally, allowing you to keep track of all your customer feedback without any manual work.  

Given the collaborative nature of Docs, you can also use the comments feature to answer any questions the customer may have, and you can even tag-in your product team as long as they’re in Vitally!

Deliver a Tailored Business Review

From Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) to Executive Business Reviews (EBRs), conducting highly successful business reviews is one of the core responsibilities of a Customer Success Manager. So why not make them easier and more tailored using a Doc? 

With Vitally, CSMs can easily create a Doc for Quarterly or Executive Business Reviews including important information like:

• Account name and essential data
• Customer goals
• Dates of previous and upcoming business reviews
• Checklist of items to go over during the review call  

Using this Doc will help you stay on track during your business reviews, and give your customers insight into how they’ve been using your product or service. 

Business review Docs can also be a helpful way to empower your customer to relay information back to their business. This can help inform stakeholders, but also provide continued buy-in and support for the product you’re selling.

Surface Insights and Best Practices

Docs can serve as a helpful knowledge resource for your customers. If you’re a smaller team without a dedicated knowledge base or help center, Docs can fill that gap by documenting setup tips, best practices, FAQs, and product updates. 

Even if you already have a knowledge base with documentation, there’s probably more information you’d like your customers to know, like different use cases for your product or service, workarounds or creative solutions, and recommended best practices. These might not fit in with your existing documentation, in which case a Doc is the perfect solution. 

Finally, you may have confidential information about your product or service that you don’t want the eyes of the entire Internet to see — in this case, you can create a private knowledge base for just your customers using a Doc that’s shared directly with them. 

These are just a few of the many ways you can use Docs to create shared workspaces that foster deeper collaboration with your customers. To see more examples of how Vitally customers are leveraging Docs in their businesses, check out the Blueprints Library.

If you’re interested in learning more about Vitally, schedule a demo today.