Lane trusts Baton for its SaaS implementations

November 29, 2021

Lane’s workplace experience platform for coordinated office automation continues to grow at a pace most tech investors dream about. For Lane’s commercial real estate customers, the experience they deliver is significant.

Lane helps office building tenants connect to their work life. As tenants approach their office they can use a mobile phone to enter the property, book meeting rooms, and scan into their property’s unique Lane instance to see building events, gain access to predetermined secure areas and join their specific work community. As you might imagine, Lane software deployments require focused collaboration from all involved.

Business Challenges:

Prior to working with Baton, Lane’s onboarding process had a few challenges. Like most onboarding teams in B2B SaaS, that period of time after customers sign on but before they’re fully onboarded is critical. Communications need to be clear, timely, coordinated and engaging. Existing project tools weren’t cutting it and over time, Lane discovered that a basic Gantt chart failed to capture the customers’ attention or deliver the responsiveness needed for swift deployments. Since they knew their team was strong (and super busy), they deduced that better onboarding tools were in order.    

Quickly growing from a staff of three to over 100, with operations in 22+ cities, meant that Lane needed to establish new, reliable implementation processes. Lane’s implementation team needed a client engagement platform that would help them communicate more efficiently and instill project accountability via automated reminders, easy-to-build status reports and auditable tracking of all project activity. What Lane had learned in their rapid expansion was that the sooner their customers were able to experience their platform’s real value, the more likely they were to expand their software to other office locations, and far less likely to churn. 

Becki Kimpton, Lane’s Director of Implementation, decided to check out Baton, and it wasn’t long before her “mind was absolutely blown” (her words, not ours). Here are some of the highlights and related benefits of Lane’s  experience with Baton’s Implementation Management Software (IMS):

Highlights of using Baton at Lane:  

  • As tenants started returning to the office in large numbers, Lane was able to scale its implementation schedule with tools rather than incremental staff 
  • Lane now sets up clients in and demonstrates Baton as part of their standard kickoff process 
  • When implementation projects are handed from one project team member to another, an auditable trail ensures all activities have been recorded 
  • Moving away from project management software that wasn’t build for implementations gives Lane — and its clients — levels of project visibility they’d never before enjoyed 
  • Customer accountability increased because Baton’s collaboration features, timeframes, expectations and due dates are never ambiguous 
  • Lane can justify upgrades to its implementation process because Baton delivers the data metrics to show where they’re succeeding and where there’s room for improvement (measuring results is what great companies do!)
  • Automated reminders take busy work off the team’s plate and continue until remedial actions are recorded 
  • Frequency of client engagement is way up for Lane and face-to-face meetings are not encumbered with tracking down overdue updates
  • Customer engagement data is easily aggregated for reporting to Lane executives, who use the data to demonstrate their ability to scale to investors    
  • Baton data is also used by Lane to merge with their property tracking data globally for more reliable decision making
  • Focus when focus is difficult. Resources are tight industry-wide and everyone is busy, Baton helps Lane’s implementation team identify and focus on each project’s most important tasks.