To answer the question right off the bat, did COVID-19 change the client onboarding process?
Yes.
This comes as no surprise. The global health crisis changed pretty much everything else, so why wouldn’t it change the way clients are onboarded?
The recent crisis was an unprecedented event but it has also served as an eye-opening reminder that the structures we have put in place to support our lives on a private, corporate, and even national scale aren’t as robust as we may have thought.
Rolling side effects and the staying power of the pandemic also proved that this storm couldn’t be weathered by laying low and waiting for it to pass. Decisive steps needed to be taken by organizations, and fast.
It was no longer possible, feasible, or safe to leave the client onboarding process dependent on face-to-face meetings. The challenge was to make digitized onboarding possible, feasible, and safe for both your teams as well as your clients—as soon as possible.
Will this change be permanent?
Once again, the answer is most likely yes.
Even as the threat of COVID-19 ebbs, many have come to depend on the convenience and ease that online systems and remote works have brought to our lives. The way we think about accessibility has changed forever, and we have COVID-19 to thank for that.
Many of the managers who were teetering on the edge of digitizing their client onboarding processes were pushed to take the plunge in the past couple of months.
Manual onboarding processes are now a historical artifact, as companies quickly realize how continuing to do things the way they have always been done is not necessarily the best way to go about it. (I am looking at you, notoriously user-unfriendly finance! A special shoutout to those who have already hopped on the digital onboarding for financial services train 🤩)
Putting an end to manual processes means making room for convenience, accessibility across devices and locations, swifter onboarding, easy authentication and approval procedures, and much much more.
Really, I couldn’t sum up everything in one post even if we tried…
Digitalization may have sped up in response to the crisis but moving forward, now and in the future, clients will come to expect it and be inconvenienced by the lack of it.
Being able to maintain user-friendly processes every step of the way doesn’t just make things better in a practical, day-to-day sense.
A more modern system that has done away with the physical process of hightailing down to a company’s physical premises—documents in tow—to sign forms and ask questions, will show your customers that not only are you up to date but that you are quick on the uptake too.
What’s more, you can really deliver the value your clients crave. Digital onboarding, with its automated workflows, makes it possible for you and employees to talk the talk and walk the walk when it comes to innovation.
Times of crisis tend to give a lot of industries tunnel vision.
This may just be an evolutionary response designed to ensure that any business can keep operating and surviving in the midst of the crisis, but it can be harmful in the long run.
Instead of looking at the changes wrought by the crisis as a temporary change in the landscape, it’s time you embraced digital platforms as your Plan A and provide digital experience to our clients. It is also a cost-effective method to onboard new clients and new employees in the long run.
Embracing digitalization in your client onboarding process and beyond is critical to ensuring that you develop a more safe, trustworthy, and long-lasting foundation that is supportive of the path you are taking.
To put it another way, you don’t want your clients to be wowed by how amazing your new platform sounds only to have to cope with an unstable, difficult-to-navigate UI when it’s time to utilize it.
You also don’t want your new and improved client experience to end with one cumbersome step in the process.
Stay consistently impressive throughout the onboarding process.
Your customers deserve it, and so do you.
Clustdoc provides complete solutions to all the onboarding processes. Check out Clustdoc if you want to get started with digital onboarding for your organization.
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.
