Not so long ago, client onboarding was a powerful strategy that only big corporations would invest in.
But, since the beginning of the pandemic, it’s not the same case anymore.
Businesses are investing more and more in superior client onboarding automation and customer-centric digital workflows to supercharge the customer experience and win more clients.
If you typed ‘client onboarding’ on Indeed, you’d probably come across thousands of job offers. This is how much businesses are investing to improve onboarding experience for their clients.
So if you missed this trend, that’s okay, you can still hop on the train. Discover below 10 benefits of client onboarding automation for your business.
If you were to keep one valid reason for using client onboarding automation in your business, it would definitely be the security aspect.
Data-privacy laws have flourished worldwide, putting many small businesses at risk and exposing them to growing amounts of fines.
Imagine that you’ve recently implemented a client onboarding automation software.
Using this new system, you can build privacy-friendly workflows that will help you and your team better protect clients’ data and documents.
The system will automatically organize client files and sensitive data on a centralized platform, avoiding you to use emails or spread data across various unprofessional tools.
Also, thanks to built-in security features like the ones below, you could better handle the data submitted by your client:
As a manager, your role is to find the best ways to help your team work smarter.
And, bringing clarity to your routine workflows is a great place to start from.
In a chaotic environment, it’s much harder for your team to complete their day to day tasks.
They spend more time trying to come up with interim solutions to fix operational challenges rather than focusing on their job and core assignments in a systematic way.
A typical example would be an employee wanting to find a better way of managing new and potential clients while only focusing on one aspect of the client management process.
No manager wants to hear that Martin from Sales did not yet follow up with the client because he spent the day looking for a video recording solution to present your offer to the client and impress them.
But what if this happened because your client operations are not well-defined?
To remove chaos from your business operations, it’s important to have a single source of truth for each of the main areas of your business.
The implementation of a centralized client onboarding automation system that unifies onboarding processes is a way to solve this issue.
It allows you to take control of your internal processes and define right away a company-wide workflow that everyone in the team should use to manage new customers.
And to achieve this, you’ll need a dedicated system.
Most professionals are often looking for one app that does it all, but it’s almost impossible to find that.
In 2021, companies worldwide were using on average 110 SaaS solutions.
Now, if you’re a small business you would probably have a third of the above number, but still, my point is that the perfect app can only be great at one thing at a time.
That’s why finding the best tool to manage each aspect of your business could be one of your best strategic moves.
By breaking down each area of your business, you’ll easily find a solution to help your team work in a more efficient way. A few examples below:
Then, you could easily group these apps and integrate them with each other to facilitate the work and build highly performing systems for each of your departments.
Picture this.
You received a new lead inquiry and jumped to your inbox to reach out as soon as possible. But, once you sent your beautifully crafted welcome email with a few attachments, you didn’t hear back from the client.
Crickets chirping. Sounds familiar?
Well, this is how churn looks usually like for most traditional businesses during the client onboarding process.
On average, companies in the financial sector experienced a 25% churn rate in 2020.
That’s pretty high.
But that’s also where a streamlined client onboarding can make a difference and help you keep new leads engaged throughout the intake phase.
But how is that, would you ask?
The issue with remote client onboarding is that most people get lazier behind a screen. It’s much harder to catch someone’s attention when your only way of reaching out is via email or phone.
People tend to look for self-serve digital experiences, so you need to facilitate their work as much as possible.
Any email that requires your contact to stop and think too much, is another chance to lose them.
Likewise, any new client inquiry that requires you to work, assemble, copy and paste information for the client will create process lags.
If you rely on manual tasks to manage new clients, it’s hard to give customers fast, convenient service and support.
Client onboarding automation will help you prevent that.
Your routine client-centric workflows are the blueprints of your onboarding workflows.
While designing them, you can easily anticipate by:
Your workflow will remove any noise from your contact’s mind and help them complete your intake process in no time.
You don’t want to NOT know what’s going on with new clients, do you?
While your CRM gives you an understanding of how your team is managing new leads, setting up a scalable client onboarding automation allows you to see with your own eyes where your leads stand in the process.
Having a visual representation of your leads’ activity during the intake phase allows you to pinpoint any blocker much faster and act right away.
Any client onboarding automation software will provide you with an analytics dashboard allowing you to address any of these common questions:
Why is this process on hold? Did you receive the client’s files? You won’t have to ask these questions over and over again thanks to your new client onboarding automation system.
Your client onboarding automation system allows you to better understand how your team is performing and what KPIs you need to focus on for long term success.
All Sales reps, regardless of the industry they are in, are looking for better ways to close deals faster.
See? And, I am sure your sales department team also has the same concern.
Client onboarding automation is a great complementary way to supercharge the way you and your team manage new leads.
There are great automation examples you could copy to onboard new leads to your services without lifting a finger.
A simple example would be:
This way, you and your team will save a bunch of manual tasks when it comes to managing new leads.
KYC (Know Your Customer) standards are worldwide best practices initially designed to protect financial institutions from fraud, money laundering, and suspicious activity.
Today, any business could implement such practices to protect the way they do business more, especially in a remote-first world where it’s not always clear who is hiding behind a screen.
Client onboarding automation allows, once again, to better monitor this risk by building from the beginning, Standard Operating Procedures to guide your team through all the verifications they must complete with any of your business stakeholders.
Implementing a KYC Onboarding automation gives you more visibility on your business and better tracking of data (personal, financial, etc).
With Clustdoc, the use of the onboarding checklist allows businesses to list custom KYC questions and verifications during the intake phase.
Way too many organizations are still relying on manual tasks to collect, review and input data.
The more manual tasks you have, the more you need to reinvent the wheel.
For example, let’s say you have 5 Sales reps who handle 3 new clients everyday.
Your company will have at least 300 new client intakes to manage every month.
Now, we assume that each client intake would require 25-30 emails and phone calls until it’s done, that’s a minimum of 7500 tasks per month that must be handled by your team only for onboarding.
According to the Institute of Robotic Process Automation, chances are that a few errors and glitches would probably sneak into your intake processes, and here are just a few of them:
This means more work for your team, additional inconsistency in your workflows, and potential delays which will lead to an increased operations cost for your business.
So, how can client onboarding help you prevent that?
First, onboarding automation solutions allow you to pinpoint quickly what information is missing and fix this with a few clicks, either by inputting the right information yourself or looping in the person who needs to take action.
Also, while building your client onboarding workflow, you can assign to each task a due date to prevent any delay.
While considering your service or product, your prospects are probably busy living their lives.
If you want to grab their attention from the beginning, you need to invest in customer experiences they would love.
The thing is that building a full web experience costs money and time.
Luckily, a client onboarding portal is another way to showcase your automated client onboarding workflows.
For example, you could build an end-to-end process for new customers and publish it to your client onboarding portal which would be accessible from your website.
This, in turn, speeds up your onboarding and allows any website visitor to get started with your intake process right away, while they’re available and ready to move forward.
Let me ask you something — how many internal conversations do you have while managing a new client?
Companies tend to forget that internal approvals and interactions are also part of client onboarding.
They contribute to progressing the whole process and should also be optimized as much as possible.
Thankfully, with the right digital onboarding automation tool, you can also declutter your inbox and make the whole back-and-forth a better experience.
A shared inbox will allow you to have private conversations about each of your leads with internal stakeholders without having to open your email.
There are obviously additional reasons why you should consider automating your client onboarding today, but the above list focuses on the main value drivers for your business.
If you’re ready to give client onboarding automation a try, we can definitely help you with that.
Reach out to find out how Clustdoc could help you digitize and automate your workflows.
Clustdoc is a client onboarding orchestration platform used by modern teams around the world. With Clustdoc, you can run automated workflows for requesting, reviewing and verifying new customers’ data, documents and contracts – without juggling between tools.
If your team is managing new customers using emails, spreadsheets and PDFs, you’ll probably love using Clustdoc.
