Why is customer onboarding important?
Onboarding is so much more than just a process to welcome your new customer. It is an opportunity for you to capture vital information and build up a picture of that individual and their unique concerns and interests that you can use to tailor and optimize the rest of their customer journey.
Put simply, first impressions count. The onboarding process is particularly important in industries such as financial services and insurance where onboarding and renewal are the defining moments in the journey every customer takes. The onboarding process to establish an initial quote and check eligibility and initiate a service will often be the only interactions that a customer has with the organization (unless there’s a problem or in the case of insurance – the need to make a claim).
The customer information collected during onboarding then feeds through to the renewal process, which is the critical experience for reducing churn. Companies can take strategic measures to improve the renewal process such as offering highly relevant promotions in the lead up to renewal time. A mere 1% difference in churn can have a 12% impact on company valuation in five years, according to SaaS Capital, so being able to satisfy customers and turn them into brand advocates is a sure-fire way to secure future success.
But as with any digital strategy, if your onboarding process doesn’t transcend your internal silos, your customer analytics strategies likely won’t either. As Forrester’s VP Research Director, Michael Barnes observed, “Most firms still operate in silos: marketing, sales, service, production, and other teams all focus on optimizing their on functions, including the use of data and analytics. But the customer lifecycle cuts across all of these internal organization boundaries.” It’s more important than ever to present a unified approach to customer service
The best way to ensure that customers are receiving the optimum experience is to automate your core processes. Automation can quickly move you beyond merely satisfying customers to turning them into advocates by providing great experiences every time. Allowing for highly personalized, contextual multi-channel experiences will then also provide opportunities for cross-selling.
Automation is even more vital for global organizations as operations can vary greatly by region. This can lead to inconsistent and inefficient experiences for customers, inconveniencing them and, worse still, losing money. Automation allows you to establish a single approach to onboarding whilst allowing flexibility to adhere to local laws and regulations, enabling you to derive cost and speed efficiencies as well.
Automation can bring real benefits to organizations. For example, Bizagi customer, Old Mutual had 11 disconnected systems with no single view of the customer. This created an unnecessarily long onboarding process as staff relied on individually coded variables to approve the customer data. But by using Bizagi to orchestrate processes through a simplified data model, they reduced their customer onboarding time ten-fold.
Benefits of automating customer onboarding
- Improved efficiency: Automating onboarding streamlines the process and gets customers signed up to your services faster, which equates to a faster time-to-market. - Accuracy and consistency: Automated processes are standardized to ensure that every new customer goes through the same process and checks can ensure that all information entered meets your specified requirements. - Improved customer satisfaction: A smooth onboarding process sets the tone for the rest of your relationship with the customer, promoting advocacy and satisfaction for the rest of the customer journey. - Reduced operational costs: Less people need to be involved in the process than with manual onboarding, which reduces overheads. - Data protection & compliance: Meet regulatory responsibilities and adhere to all legal data privacy and security requirements by automating checks and ensuring data is entered, handled and stored in the correct way. - System integration: Automation platforms easily integrate with other technologies, such as your CRM, CMS and analytics tools so that data doesn’t have to be rekeyed, reducing the risk of error or duplication. This improves data flow and operational efficiency across the organization.
When optimizing your onboarding experience, put yourself in the customer’s shoes. What do you expect when you’re signing up for a new service?
Progress: Consider elements such as the endowed progress effect, i.e. a progress bar to show how many more steps of the onboarding progress they have until completion. This will reduce the abandonment rate as users can see how long until they finish their onboarding.
Only ask for essentials: Don’t ask for any information that you don’t need. If it doesn’t deliver value for you or for them, then there is no point. Until the onboarding process is complete, every step is a chance for abandonment.
Videos: If there’s a complicated element to your product or service, then why not present it in video format? Visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text, so a video can help the learning process.
If you want to see how Bizagi can help make all this advice into actionable steps to improve your customer onboarding strategy, you can watch our webinar: ‘How to Improve New Customer Onboarding’.
Find out more about Bizagi’s customer experience automation solution for customer onboarding, customer communication and contextualized experiences.
