Is customer onboarding always bound to have friction? A plethora of businesses believe there is no way around abrasive segments — and both the company and its clients pay the cost. Business users have to wait for almost six to 12 weeks to connect with customers, which impacts their ease of doing business and ability to drive value. As a result, Thomson Reuters found out that 89% of clients endure such subpar onboarding and its adverse effects.
Commercial clients and your teams deserve more from your onboarding. The problem happens when customers are forced to wait for months to get onboarded in the business ecosystem. Customers, as a result, are more unlikely to either stay with the business or buy new products or services.
It’s important to understand what irks customers about a company’s onboarding process. Here are some reasons why companies may find it difficult to onboard customers.
1. Too Much Information to Process
Customer data has turned more voluminous and complex than ever. Businesses find it challenging to onboard such enormous information on time. Naturally, customers become frustrated and nervous as they pass through highly sensitive information like identity, credit checks, and more. Despite maintaining compliance regulations, many users often lack the means to balance the customer experience with efficient information requests. And so, it becomes an uphill struggle to balance the walk between compliance and customer satisfaction.
2. Redundant Requests for Information
When clients encounter an onboarding department, they become increasingly frustrated as business users ask for information already obtained by the company. The problem? Multiple departments involved in onboarding don’t often share their data with each other.
A bank’s data silos cause a customer to take a look at the requests for the same. Without knowing why they’re encountering this problem, they will encounter these requests from each department that has yet to identify and verify their information. This triggers bureaucracy fatigue as clients endure each department’s cycle that includes manual data intake, storage uploads, verifications, and follow-up analysis.
3. Conventional or Paper-Heavy Processes
Customers or clients feel burdened by document handling that is rooted in manual and paper-based tasks. From consolidating documents to setting up new bank accounts and beyond, customers and bank employees struggle to create and maintain accurate bank records.
Manual intervention acts as a nightmare for businesses. So much so that it leaves processing bottlenecked at a few human checkpoints. Without automated avenues to digitally submit, validate, correct and exchange data across partner ecosystems, many organizations will lose customers along the way. Customer onboarding will continue to drag for up to 16 weeks at $20K to $30K for each client that chooses to tolerate this painful trial.
4. Departmental Chaos
In many organizations, IT resources take six to 12 weeks to create onboarding connections with customers and maintain them to boot. In the process, business users wait to connect to customers and deliver on their needs and requirements. Such friction between non-IT and IT departments result in long wait cycles, impacting customers delight and satisfaction.
Reimagine Your Approach of Customer Onboarding with Self-Service
When onboarding is a struggle for you, self-service integration is the panacea. It empowers even non-technical business users to onboard complex, bidirectional customer data streams in minutes instead of months. Rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning enable business users to map and integrate this data with ease and precision. It speeds up insights delivery that helps users make good business decisions and drive value forward.
Related White Paper: Reimagine your Customer Data Integration
By enabling business users to quickly connect with customers and deliver on their needs, companies can create delightful CXs and improve the ease of doing business. Meanwhile, IT users can focus on more high-value tasks, enabling innovation and growth.
Suffice to say, taking a self-service approach can help you overcome all the onboarding struggles mentioned above.