For quite long, enterprise ecosystems relied on archaic methods and manual coding to execute myriad mission-critical tasks such as data onboarding. With the rise of technology and innovation, these archaic solutions turned obsolete and eventually modern solutions took over. This paradigm shift prompted businesses to undergo “the great onboarding renaissance”.
Intelligent integration is one of the main drivers of this change. Verily, it has metamorphosized the onboarding regime for the better, making it simpler and faster than ever. No longer companies have to succumb to delays caused due to manual data sharing schemes and premature, disconnected business environments. They can savor additional perks to boot. For instance, when organizations onboard their customers’ data faster, they are able to deliver value faster; customer delight and satisfaction are rendered as the immediate corollaries. Not to mention, the resulting fluid, connected experiences are foundational for better sales and revenue.
The prevalent pressure on IT to onboard is also greatly alleviated. This happens as the modern integration solutions enable business users, and not just the IT, onboard customer data quickly — from months to minutes. Consequently, IT teams are exempted from solely carrying out operational tasks such as onboarding and integration and focus on high -impact tasks such as governance and compliance monitoring instead.
Simply put, next-gen integration solutions are helping companies increase the onboarding speed ten folds, boost IT governance, and ultimately transform customer journeys. Before delving into the anatomy of modern integration solutions and their role in onboarding, it’s important to know what constitutes onboarding, and what factors and potential red flags play major roles in fueling companies’ market expansion and growth.
The Path to Onboarding Dominance
Data exchange is elementary for an organization to function and prosper. Data is not only exchanged or shared within myriad departments of an organization but also beyond — with external entities like customers, partners, vendors and suppliers. This bi-directional data flow fosters interoperability and promotes collaboration which helps organizations deliver value. The process that involves exchanging data with these elements and managing data flow via channels such as automated file transfers, email, cloud application, etc. is called customer data onboarding.
Before the world saw onboarding resurgence, enterprises relied on websites and portals to manually share data and handle recurring data flows. Doing so they suffered from delays and incurred losses that were enough to bring enterprises reduce to rubble.
With the evolution in technology and the rise of automation, businesses have transformed customer data onboarding and its impact on business. By switching to automated, event-triggered data flows, they have transformed customer data onboarding, making it faster and efficient. Plus, such modern integration solutions allow data exchange to occur in a recurring manner- near or real-time, daily, monthly, annually, etc. To learn more, go through our blog, “Customer Data Onboarding — Automated, Recurring Data Exchanges with Customers”.
Though automation serves onboarding well, there are times when companies are not able to exercise its benefits. A lot of factors come into play and one has to keep these factors in mind to reap maximum dividends.
High Impact Factors
Customer data onboarding is contingent on a number of factors:
- Number of customer integrations to manage: More the number of customers’ integrations to manage, more complex data onboarding becomes. Further, the time and effort to monitor, track, and manage data flows increase by leaps and bounds.
- Ability to Control: To set up automated, recurring data flows, enterprises ought to have flexibility in handling myriad data standards, protocols, formats, and channels. Moreover, they must control data quality and customer timelines to make onboarding faster and error-free.
- Pressure from the delivery team: When a new customer is acquired, the pressure from IT teams to get them onboarded increases. In such a case, the IT team needs to onboard new customers — in just hours or a few calendar days.
- IT resources and tools: Being a resource-intensive task, customer onboarding can be done successfully when the teams are equipped with skills and developer tools. Lack of any of two can prove detrimental to the process.
There are a few other factors that are worth mentioning: scalability and exception handling. To find how these factors can impact onboarding and how important it is for organizations to probe a solution that addresses them all, click “10 Factors That Make Customer Data Onboarding Hard”.
Red Flags
Overlooking factors mentioned above can corrupt the onboarding process, choking companies’ growth. The only way out is to identify the red flags and treat them before they could do any major damage. Here are some of the most prevalent red flags that can indicate that organizations are making a huge “onboarding error”.
- Takes too long: If a company is taking a lot of time to establish data flow with customers, then it is likely that their onboarding approach is a “Mess”. Ideally, these exchanges should not take more than a few days or minutes.
- Absence of central dashboard: If a company lacks a central dashboard to manage and monitor data exchanges, then it is likely that the results are “Sub-optimal”. A consolidated dashboard is necessary for enabling customer service to gain data access and evaluate specific customer or partner and identify issues.
- Burdens IT team: If a company’s IT sets up data flows, then it is likely that they are “Burdened”. As a result, the already overextended IT teams are not able to focus on other essential tasks. In actuality, companies must provide the self-service capability to empower business and operational teams onboard customer data — and that too without IT support.
Of course, these red flags are not the only ones. To know more in detail, click here to read our blog, “CIO: Five Signs That You’re Doing Customer Data Onboarding Wrong” for detailed info.
Solution that Speaks Volumes
Organizations can gain an onboarding dominance and thereby maximize business outcomes by relying on modern integration solutions. With self-service capability ingrained, these solutions can empower non-technical business users onboard faster by up to 80% and manage bi-directional data flows with ease and precision. In other words, users can use the inbuilt library of application connectors and shared templates to self-serve and manage data connections and operations without seeking external help.
As the process’s speed is accentuated manifold, customers’ needs and requirements can be met without delay. More control on data quality through a centrally-managed monitoring dashboard and end-to-end encrypted environment is achieved and IT teams no longer experience friction due to overload.
Simply put, self-service integration platforms can help businesses reach for the top through faster and efficient onboarding.
