Companies must develop long-term relationships with their customers to ensure success – and a reliable revenue stream. Studies have indicated that it’s five to 25 times more expensive to foster a new customer relationship than to retain and nurture an existing one. A majority of organizations, therefore, are shifting from the transactional model of hitting one-time sales targets of services or products to the subscription model, which helps build relationships and ultimately recurring revenue. In fact, such organizations are adapting upselling strategies to delight and satisfy their existing customers. However, there are multiple roadblocks that can prevent companies from making that happen. Slow onboarding is the biggest among all.
When traditional data integration methods are used, companies take weeks or months of calendar time to onboard new business customers. The entire responsibility of implementing onboarding connections falls on the shoulders of IT because business users lack the expertise to perform initial onboarding. What’s more, IT takes considerable time (six to 12 weeks) to implement data connections with customers. When data integration takes so long, the customers are forced to connect with business workers and have their needs met. As a result, relationships begin with a negative impression, and those accounts remain at a high risk of attrition.
Obviously, such developments can have a colossal impact on a company’s revenue stream. When the company is losing customers owing to poor service, they are required to invest additional time selling to new clients in order to manage the impact of churn. That means companies have less time to create strong customer relationships and increase revenue. Also, customers that are disappointed with long onboarding and integration processes will spread the word to other businesses. Consequently, new customers will shy away from investing in or signing up with the company.
How Self-service Can Drive Upsell
Companies can leverage self-service data integration solutions to shorten the onboarding time by as much as 80 percent. That means their business customers only wait days – or even hours – for their information to be onboarded, instead of weeks or months.
When self-service integration solutions are used, companies will be more business agile and thus able to ramp existing new business customers onto new services quickly and easily. This eliminates frustration and delays and keeps them delighted with their service – and customers ultimately stay with the company. And, when an onboarding solution that is scalable is used, such companies continue to deliver value to customers even when the needs and requirements of these customers change.
Organizations that rely on self-service customer data integration solutions can add new products or services easily and quickly. They do not have to put a lot of effort into performing those upgrades in a much easier and simple manner. Along with that, these solutions make the onboarding experience much more positive, fast, and simple. As a result, customers become delighted and satisfied and are more likely to buy additional products or services from the company. That’s because these customers witness how smooth the process is – and how little burden it puts on the IT. They’re more willing to try new products and expand their relationship with the company, which increases revenue.
Adopting a self-service data integration approach is a powerful way to enable companies to onboard customers 80 percent faster and deliver the value promised to them – easily and quickly. Because this helps companies keep their customers delighted, they can upsell them faster. So, with a self-service-powered solution in place, companies can onboard customers quickly and encourage them to buy more products or services.