4 Signs You Need a Customer Onboarding Process Upgrade

Seventy-four percent of prospective clients are deterred by complex customer onboarding processes, making a streamlined process critical to building and maintaining a strong client base.

Unfortunately, many organizations across many industries struggle not only to simplify their customer onboarding processes but to determine that they’re overly complex and ineffective in the first place. Here are four tell-tale signs that your current process could use an upgrade:

Sign #1: High Drop-Off Rate

First up, we have the most evident of our top signs: a high drop-off rate.

Your customer onboarding process drop-off rate reveals the percentage of clients who discontinue their partnership with your organization before being fully onboarded. And it’s relatively easy to calculate. To start, take the total number of customers who entered your onboarding process and divide it by the number of customers who abandoned it. Then, multiply that number by 100.

Experts found that an ideal onboarding completion rate is anywhere from 30% to 60%, making a 70% or lower drop-off rate a good benchmark. If your drop-off rate is higher than 70%, there’s likely something amiss in your customer onboarding process and it could be impacting your organization at a much higher level than you realize.

Since you maintain resources to handle the onboarding process under the impression that you will generate revenue from it, your financial health could be at risk. Afterall, revenue isn’t generated when clients drop off, you don’t get the labor expenses you utilized back, and your staff doesn’t get their valuable time back.

Sign #2: Poor Time to Value

In addition to customer onboarding simplicity levels, clients have high expectations when it comes to time to first value. No one wants to be pulled through a complex and lengthy process in order to achieve the benefits they were promised. Your customers want immediate satisfaction.

If you’re currently struggling to provide your new customers with the value they expect when they expect it, you’re in need of a process revamp. Done right, you can reduce your time to value by 34%.

Sign #3: Lack of Transparency

Does your team have easy access to key customer onboarding insights? Can they effectively measure the effectiveness of your current process? Are they able to quickly access client-specific data?

If you answered “no” to any – or all – of these questions, you’re certainly not alone, but your client onboarding process isn’t as efficient as it could be.

When organizations lack transparency in their processes, onboarding challenges skyrocket. You’re unable to determine which areas of your process need work, so continuous improvement is nearly impossible, and you can’t properly personalize the process for your clients.

This is often a huge hit to many companies since 90% of customers are willing to spend more with organizations with personalized experiences. Transparency could be the difference between a streamlined onboarding process and an inefficient one as well as the difference between financial strain and growth.

Sign #4: Technology Limitations

In order to achieve a fully transparent customer onboarding process, you need to effectively collect, verify, and manage incoming data. And the only way to do that is through advanced technology solutions.

Unfortunately, many organizations have customer onboarding automation technology in place that doesn’t live up to its promises…

Several automated client onboarding solutions come with the promise of a streamlined process that reduces manual labor, decreases costs, and improves client satisfaction, among other benefits. More often than not, these promises turn out to be empty, leaving organizations with technology that actually creates more bottlenecks. Some common technology shortcomings include:

• Ineffective system integrations
• Poor reporting and lack of insights
• Manual work requirements

If you’re currently facing these challenges, the time to optimize your client onboarding process is now.

Upgrade Your Process with Customer Onboarding Automation

Now that you know some of the top signs that you need to upgrade your onboarding process, you need to know how to properly upgrade it. The simple answer? Adopt the right customer onboarding automation solution.

The best solutions combine advanced artificial intelligence (AI)-powered automation technology and trusted business process management services. Top providers have extensive data management experience, excelling at data collection, verification, extraction, and routing as well as customer onboarding-specific document management. They also maintain robust security protocols, adhering to standards in heavily regulated industries and ensuring your data remains safe.

MetaSource’s customer onboarding automation solution meets all of these requirements and lives up to its promises. As a leader in intelligent document processing (IDP) , we help organizations optimize their client onboarding processes and, in turn, personalize customer experiences, boost productivity, gain easy access to data to make better decisions, enhance client satisfaction, decrease time to value, and improve customer retention. Contact us to get started today.

Still not entirely sure if it’s the best time for your organization to optimize your client onboarding process? Download our free guide to learn more about how to evaluate your current process, the benefits of streamlining it, and what you need to get a process makeover.