When customers have to wait for weeks or months to get onboarded into a business ecosystem, they are bound to feel exhausted and ignored. Unhappy customers oftentimes trigger negative consequences, such as attrition and ultimately revenue slippage.
So, companies need to find out a way to reduce the customer wait time and turbocharge their onboarding efforts. The role of reimagined customer data onboarding solutions comes into play here.
But before we delve into these next-gen solutions, let’s understand why long customer wait cycles are hurting businesses.
What happens when customer onboarding takes weeks or months?
Suppose, you are waiting in a long queue, for a few hours, to get a new iPhone. The chances of you feeling irritated and exhausted would probably be less.
But, if the duration of “waiting” increases to a few days or a month?
Then, frustration is an obvious response. And the chances of you leaving the queue would go up. Isn’t it?
And now, imagine customers waiting for weeks or months to get onboarded? Think, how would they feel?
Truth is, long wait cycles can actually put a customer’s patience to the test. Consequently, the chances of them buying more products or services from the brand are minimal. And sometimes, they might not even stay. In other words, long customer wait times could push customers to a point of no return. Plus, they can influence others to not invest. So, not only can long waiting times hurt a business’s upselling strategies but also increase attrition.
Legacy customer onboarding strategies are one of the few reasons why customers have to wait. That’s because they are not onboarded soon enough and need to wait to get connected to a business user. Clearly, that fills them with frustration and dissatisfaction. When customers don’t receive what they’ve been promised on time, they’re more likely to not buy or invest more if not leave entirely.
In a way, slow customer data onboarding can be a major dealbreaker.
However, companies can reimagine their onboarding efforts through self-service to resolve the issue. Self-service-powered onboarding solutions can accelerate the process by as much as 80 percent, reducing the waiting time and delivering the promised value sooner. Let’s find out how.
Use self-service to speed up onboarding by up to 80 percent, from months to minutes
Companies with legacy solutions in place take a lot of time to onboard customers. IT integrations, typically, take weeks or months to create onboarding connections with customers. In the process, they write custom codes and run complex EDI mapping routines to onboard complex customer data streams, which is not only time-consuming but also error-prone. Self-service onboarding solutions can accelerate the process by bringing business users to the forefront and minimizing IT’s efforts.
Self-service integration solutions enable non-technical business users to implement onboarding connections by simply pointing and clicking through easy screens. That takes only minutes or hours. This data is then integrated and used for making decisions and delivering value to customers. This way, anyone can be turned into a citizen integrator and everyone in the company can play a central role in delighting and adding value to the business. At the same time, IT is freed to take up the role of governance and focus on high-productivity tasks.
With features such as pre-built application connectors, shared templates, AI-data mapping, intuitive screens, dashboards, etc., even non-techies can implement data connections in minutes and integrate new customers. The customer data can be analyzed for making decisions and value generation. That improves the ease of doing business and creates new revenue streams for the business.
In short, companies can reimagine their customer data onboarding efforts by using self-service powered solutions to reduce the customers’ wait time. Using a self-service-powered solution enable non-techies business users to onboard customers in minutes or hours while freeing IT to focus on more strategic tasks. As customers are onboarded faster, they feel delighted and inspired to buy more products or services. And so, companies can open themselves to new revenue channels and increased market share.
