How to Wow Customers During the Onboarding Process
75% of cross-sell opportunities occur within the first 90 days after gaining a customer, making onboarding a good source of potential revenue. (Deluxe, “Business Insights that Drive Results”)
The customer onboarding process is an important event between you and your customer. It sets the stage for what they will come to expect from you and how they will perceive your business. Their experience during the customer onboarding process can produce one of two results: future business or no future business. A positive experience can increase your chances for repeat business and customer referrals. A negative experience will likely have the opposite effect.
Studies show that 23 percent of customer churn is the result of a poor customer onboarding process. (Retently, “The Three Leading Causes of Customer Churn)
What Goes Wrong During the Customer Onboarding Process?
In most cases, process inefficiencies, data accessibility, and data quality are reasons why the customer onboarding process fails to impress customers. These same problems are common for many businesses because their IT ecosystem is oftentimes comprised of various separate systems and cloud applications.
Ultimately, the failure is due to a lack of connectivity between the different systems and applications. Accessing the needed business and customer data becomes a challenge for business because the many different systems and cloud applications that they rely on do not natively communicate with each other. In this type of environment, customer data management is far less effective, especially during the onboarding process.
The fast growth and evolution of technology has made the data and application connectivity problem nearly universal for many businesses and organizations over the years.
An Inside Look at the Customer Onboarding Process
What can you do to create the kind of positive customer onboarding experience you need to increase customer retention? Bridge the data and application disconnect with iPaaS, an integration platform as a service solution.
An iPaaS solution can help you eliminate the many barriers caused by disparate systems, and develop the kind of positive customer onboarding process that leads to long-term customer relationships. Below are 4 examples.
The Customer Handoff
Among the many steps throughout the customer onboarding process is the customer handoff. This generally involves manually transferring clients and communication by email. This manual process is vulnerable to human error and inefficiency.
During the customer handoff, there are many tasks to accomplish. You have to create various communications, update key stakeholders, and ensure that everyone has the information they need to take action. With the right iPaaS solution, you can connect a CRM like Salesforce and a project management system like Workfront. This allows you to synch information and use automation to trigger tasks and communication updates. You can also create onboarding templates for project or customer communications. Templates and automation save time and minimize the risk of human error.
Project Monitoring and Management
Staying current on all project issues, tasks, and statuses is also crucial to the customer onboarding process. Managing and monitoring this process manually will inevitably take up more time and resources. When you need to synchronize and monitor your IT-related onboarding tasks, you can use an iPaaS platform to connect Workfront and an IT issue tracking system like JIRA. This will integrate data between the systems so that the status of important technological tasks is known by all key stakeholders.
Internal Communications
It’s important to streamline your internal communication process so that all customer facing and internal partners stay in updated. Using an iPaaS to connect project management tools or CRMs to a messaging tool like Slack will help facilitate important information sharing. Whenever a new issue is created in a management tool, you can create a trigger that notifies all key stakeholders in Slack, individually or via Slack channels.
Financial Coordination and Management
Financial data also plays a crucial role during the onboarding process. When you need to coordinate sales orders, quotes, fulfillment, and billing, you can save a great deal of time by using your iPaaS platform to connect your CRM with an ERP solution like NetSuite. This will synchronize customer contact and financial information, which can improve visibility and efficiency.
Streamline Customer Onboarding Process with iPaaS
Business and customer data integration with an iPaaS solution can bridge the disconnect between the various systems storing your data, including your cloud applications and on-premises systems. It can serve as the connector that your business needs to gain fast access to critical data, which may be stored across various locations throughout your IT ecosystem.
With an iPaaS solution, you can accomplish the following:
- Modernize your IT environment
- Optimize process efficiency
- Increase quality data connectivity