Customer satisfaction plays a vital role in your business. Not only is it the key indicator of customer loyalty and growth, but also it is a crucial point of differentiation that helps you pull in new customers in competitive business environments.
As per research by Harvard Business Review, companies who successfully manage and carry out strategies to improve customer satisfaction through seamless experiences reap rewards: alleviated churn, faster time-to-value, increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
While many factors affect customer satisfaction, growing customer expectations and demands are its key determinants.With increasing competition, customer expectations are higher than ever. Truth is, customers demand reliable service, and if they don’t get it fast, they can turn to another company. So, it is not surprising that lasting customer onboarding experience is essential for improving customer satisfaction. However, there are many hurdles that slow onboarding down, thus making customers unhappy and increasing overhead costs. A solution to these grave issues lies in employing intelligent automation for transforming customer onboarding. But first, let’s explore the hurdles in detail.
Identifying Hurdles
Conventional onboarding processes are lengthy and tiresome. Sometimes they can take up to several weeks or months, fueling customer’s frustration and ultimately dissatisfaction – the effects can be detrimental as onboarding influences metrics: client loyalty, referrals, and profitability.
Here are some reasons why traditional onboarding proves ineffective and costly.
- Unstructured and lengthy process: Customer onboarding involves multiple departments in the enterprise, each with its rules and procedures. Actually, onboarding a customer can take between 20 to 60 steps even for the straightforward cases. This makes the process lengthy and confusing for customerswho might be required to provide the same information to different people several times. Long onboarding timelines compel financial institutions skip some onboarding opportunities due to inability to handle them effectively.
- Large volume to process:Onboarding involves management of at least 5 to 10 documents. These numbers can reach several dozen in complex cases. There can be cases where the same documents are processed several times by different departments at various stages of the process, which gives rise to a lot of confusion and errors.
- Abundance of regulations:Financial institutions such as banks must comply with a plethora of regulations, which makes regulatory compliance harder than ever. To function properly, banks need to take a look at their internal processes regularly, adapt internal systems, and communicate changes to customers promptly.
Crossing Onboarding Hurdles with Intelligent Automation
A lot of companies and financial units are considering intelligent automation to deal with onboarding struggles mentioned above. They can turn the process faster from months to minutes, which means companies can successfully onboard clients faster than ever.
Having said that, speed is not the only benefit of intelligent onboarding automation that you can expect. Other benefits include:
- Increased quality of customer experiences, higher customer satisfaction and loyalty, and reduced customer churn.
- Improved data processing accuracy that removes the need to repeat the same steps during a process.
- Better regulatory compliance resulting in a significantly lower risk of fines.
- Better analysis of onboarding process allows companies identify and get rid of bottlenecks that got unnoticed before.
Simply put, automating operations in customer onboarding can help companies “crack the code” for successful customer experience to stay at the top of game.