Onboarding is one of the most important parts of a customer’s experience. When done right, it delights customers and inspires them to buy more products or services from the company. When done wrong, it leaves customers unhappy and potentially questioning why they signed up with your company in the first place.
Despite its significance, many companies fail to put in the required efforts. What is more problematic is that companies often have certain misconceptions about customer onboarding, which negatively impacts customers’ experiences and delays value generation. This blog post unravels the ins and outs of three such onboarding myths:
Myth 1: You need to heavily rely on IT or technical teams
It’s true that when traditional data integration methods are used, the entire onus of implementing onboarding connections with customers is on IT. As a matter of fact, IT needs to write custom codes and execute extensive data mapping flows to complete the process of onboarding and subsequent steps of data integration. Consequently, it becomes extremely challenging for IT to focus on other priority projects. However, companies that rely on self-service integration solutions for their onboarding processes do not have to rely on their IT teams excessively. That’s because self-service integration enables non-technical business users to onboard customers while freeing IT to focus on more high-value tasks.
Myth 2: You need a lot of time to onboard customers
Business users can onboard customers faster by up to 80 percent when self-service integration solutions are used. That means users can onboard business customers in minutes instead of months.
This myth is only true when traditional data integration methods are used. Fact is, traditional data integration solutions require IT teams to write long hours of code and create data mappings to onboard and integrate customers. Sometimes it takes weeks or months of calendar time to onboard customers. Meanwhile, customers wait to connect with business users, which frustrates them and makes them unhappy. Such unhappy customers will refrain from investing in other products or services even if they decide to not leave entirely.
By leveraging self-service integration, companies cannot only onboard customers in minutes but also deliver the value they’ve promised sooner, increasing upsell and ultimately accelerating revenue growth.
Myth 3: You’ll find it difficult to onboard complex customer data streams
Self-service integration enables non-technical business users to onboard complex, bi-directional customer data in minutes. Users need to point and click through easy screens to implement data onboarding connections. So, self-service integration solutions enable business users to onboard disparate data (with different types and formats) with ease and precision. The recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning enable non-technical users to quickly map complex customer data, speeding integrations and insights delivery. As a result, companies can make proactive decisions and deliver delightful CXs. So, essentially, the customer data onboarding process can be simplified using self-service integration solutions.