these days, more and more B2B organizations are relying on upselling strategies to achieve higher returns. According to Marketo, “90 percent of customer value for B2B businesses is obtained after the initial sale.” When a company invests time in creating and implementing upselling strategies, it increases its ability to deliver the value promised to customers.
Increasing customer lifetime value benefits both the organization and the customer, delivering more revenue (with lower overhead costs) for the business and more relevancy and loyalty from the customer. Yet, achieving this sweet spot is difficult. Let’s find out why.
Slow Onboarding Impacts Upselling Efforts
While there are many reasons for this process to be difficult, slow customer onboarding is one of the most important.
A slow onboarding structure impacts a company’s ability to identify customers’ needs and requirements and deliver on them. This happens when traditional data integration methods are used.
When traditional or legacy solutions are used, companies must have their IT experts build custom codes and perform extensive data mapping flows to onboard business customers. IT integrators implement both initial and additional data integration to support initial and ongoing service levels to complete the entire process. In doing so, data moves back and forth between the business and their customers’ businesses to enact and enable services. All these steps take weeks–or–months of calendar time.
Waiting for such long periods leaves customers feeling frustrated and unsatisfied, meaning they’re less likely to purchase additional services from the company. And, when the time comes to renew their contract with the company, they may be less likely to remain a customer.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
What happens after a customer’s data is integrated is equally important and can have an enormous impact on customer retention. For example, during the process of data exchange, it’s important to have a centralized location where companies can monitor and manage those data exchanges, whatever form they may take (APIs, FTP, EDI, email, spreadsheets, etc.). Customers must have visibility to that central location to boot. Even if a company can handle such situations quickly, if the customers don’t have visibility when an issue arises, they are not going to be satisfied with the service they’re providing.
And that’s still not all. If changes are required at any time–data fields need to be added to facilitate new services and offerings, for example–the cost and effort involved in incorporating those changes can be considerable. The new data fields, for example, are specific to the integration maps, exception management code, and scripts, and it could take the company months to add those fields into the data exchanges between the company and all of their business customers, again slowing the data integration process along with the delivery of value they’ve been promised. This fills customers with frustration.
How Can Self-service Data Integration Help?
Self-service data integration solutions improve the quality of customer onboarding and help companies avoid the problems mentioned above.
Self-service data integration solutions empower non-technical business users to onboard customers up to 80 percent faster. In addition, these solutions enable users to implement data connections much more quickly while, at the same time, IT data integration experts are freed to focus on more high-value, strategic tasks.
Non-technical users can rely on these solutions to point and click through easy-to-navigate screens to implement onboarding connections much more quickly and securely. When business workers connect with customers quickly, they can address the requirements of customers and deliver on them. This makes customers happy, encouraging them to invest in other products or services offered by the company–and stay longer.
What’s more, self-service data integration solutions provide a central location for monitoring and managing data exchanges, with visibility to business customers and the ability to handle exceptions. And if changes needed to be made at any time, taking a self-service approach ensures they are easily made. That is to say, new fields can be added quickly, which ensures that customers remain delighted with the service- and are more likely to buy other products or services from the company.
In other words, self-service data integration solutions help companies drive their upselling efforts by making customers delighted and encouraging them to buy additional products or services.