The way your company sets the tone for the entire ongoing relationship it has with customers is about a lot more than simply creating goodwill. When delays are incurred, traditional data integration methods are used, and problems go unresolved, the customer onboarding process can amplify business costs, impacting your company’s revenue and reputation. When done right, on the other hand, customer onboarding can play a significant role in enabling companies to deliver delightful experiences and drive value.
Common Reasons Why Costs Go Overboard Due to Poor Onboarding
Long, cumbersome onboarding processes can create dissatisfaction and unhappiness in customers, thus increasing business costs, such as costs of acquisition and other operational costs, by leaps and bounds. So, in the times when the business costs are on the rise, slow, complex onboarding could prove detrimental.
Here are three reasons why slow customer onboarding processes can impact your business costs:
- 1.Traditional Data Integration Methods: Companies that rely on legacy data integration solutions can take weeks or months of calendar time to onboard their customers. It’s the job of IT developers to create customer onboarding connections, and if the team lacks proper skills, it ends up taking more time than needed. Meanwhile, customers wait to get connected to business users which fills them with frustration and agony. As a result, the cost of acquisition increases.
- 2.Overburdened IT: Since mostly IT developers have the responsibility to create onboarding connections, they feel pressured. That’s also because the business user does not have enough expertise to onboard a customer. In fact, business users are meant to track IT’s progress in terms of data field mapping details, and provide the customer status reports on the progress of the integration implementation, etc. To handle this complexity, many hire more technical staff which again adds to the business costs.
- 3.Business Users Do Not Have a Big Role to Play: Because IT is responsible for implementing onboarding connections with customers, business users do not have much to do apart from providing customer status reports and tracking IT’s progress. If you can empower them, they can come to the forefront and onboard customers while IT can focus on more high-value tasks. Not only can that save a lot of time but also money.
Managing Onboarding Costs through Self-Service
Self-service integration solutions enable non-technical business users to create onboarding connections in minutes. It reduces the burden on IT to solely drive onboarding processes, thus saving a lot of time and money. Also, the potential risk of hiring new IT developers is no longer required.
While business users onboard customers, IT can focus on more high-value tasks. In fact, IT can take up the governance role and drive strategic tasks with minimal pressure.
In short, companies can leverage self-service-powered solutions to onboard customers faster and deliver the value they’ve been promised while keeping costs in control.