When companies use traditional data integration methods, they take weeks or months to onboard new customers. Most of the responsibility for the work falls on the shoulders of IT. Those workers need to implement lengthy custom codes and perform extensive data mappings to implement onboarding connections. Not only is that complex, but it’s also time-consuming. What’s more, those duties prevent IT experts from focusing on more high-value, innovation-driven tasks.
Companies need to reimagine their data integration approach to solve these problems. For a better understanding, let’s focus on the four reasons companies need to transform their customer onboarding approach and how self-service can help.
Four Reasons You Should Transform Customer Onboarding
Traditional data integration solutions make onboarding complex and time-consuming. Here are four reasons companies must transform their existing approach and adopt a new one.
Reason 1: Takes weeks or months of calendar time to onboard customers
Companies that rely on the traditional data integration method take weeks or sometimes months to onboard customers. Now, such delays frustrate customers to the core. That’s because customers are forced to wait to connect with business workers. Ultimately, they have to wait to get their needs met.
Reason 2: Data in silos poses problems
Due to various reasons, including departmental differences in applications investments or M&A, data typically resides in silos. Often, data gets duplicated in disintegrated data lakes to respond to specific user demands. This makes it challenging to integrate that data. Further, these data silos have multiple standards and formats that increase problems further. Statistics indicate that companies find it difficult to onboard myriad data streams from third-party vendors and business customers. And in that case, business analysts have no control over the data structure and norms used in the data, which requires them to decode elementary data to make it compatible across sources.
Reason 3: Customers become unhappy and dissatisfied
While IT perform steps to onboard customers, business users are forced to wait to connect with customers. Such delays are the main reason for unhappiness and dissatisfaction among customers. These unhappy and dissatisfied customers are less likely to invest in other products or services. Also, these customers deteriorate the quality of the brand through negative word of mouth of recommendations. Consequently, companies experience a downfall in revenue and value.
Reason 4: Reduces IT and the business user productivity
When the entire responsibility of creating onboarding connections falls on the shoulders of IT, it becomes difficult for them to drive other strategic operations and processes. Also, because business users lack the expertise to manage data-driven operations, their participation becomes limited.
Companies can leverage self-service data integration solutions to handle these problems and transform customer onboarding.
Self-service data integration empowers non-technical business users to onboard customers much more quickly. Users need to point and click through easy screens to implement onboarding connections much more quickly. At the same time, IT feels empowered to focus on more strategic business priorities. Further, these solutions enable business users to connect with customers sooner than ever. That means companies can address customers’ needs and meet them on time. These customers will become happy and satisfied, enabling companies to grow new revenue streams.