Customer onboarding expectations are changing at pace, and an insufficient customer onboarding process can cause organisations to fall at the first hurdle.
By reducing complexity and the time it takes to onboard customers, organisations build customer trust with the potential to flourish into future business and longstanding relationships.
Incremental Principal Dynamics Consultant, Kritika Nigam, has shared the key considerations in forging the path to successful customer onboarding using the Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365.
“In 2023, we observed a convergence of macroeconomic challenges, including heightened inflation and increased market volatility, both factors that impact organisational profitability. To survive in the competitive market, organisations must address cost challenges, expand client servicing capabilities and improve operational efficiency.
In a traditional organisation, sometimes it can feel like the more customers you add to your portfolio, the more staff you need to cater to them. In more extreme cases, firms breach a threshold where costs outpace revenue, driving profitability in a downward trajectory.
I would like to explore how Microsoft Dynamics 365 empowers us to build a platform that can revolutionise customer onboarding. With automated internal processes, minimisation of paper and manual tasks, Microsoft Dynamics 365 can be leveraged to streamline and automate the process of bringing new customers into your business ecosystem without exponentially increasing your operating costs.
Challenges of customer onboarding
Scalability refers to a firm’s capacity to expand its client base and assets without experiencing proportional increases in costs. This article leverages industry-level experience across various customer onboarding implementations to explore the challenges firms face in achieving scalability. It provides insights into how digital technology can help firms overcome these challenges.
Figure 1 – Common customer onboarding challenges
Currently, organisations face challenges across departments which not only make the customer onboarding process cumbersome and error-prone but also results in decreased efficiency and customer satisfaction levels. Some of the key challenges faced by organisations include:
- Length of process: A lengthy process with a need to contact customer and internal teams for information
- Lack of single customer view: The absence of a comprehensive 360-degree view leads to subpar customer service
- A marketing professional may record leads into the system and pass them along to sales teams, but with inadequate data, this results in the sales team being unprepared for their client interactions.
- Likewise, the sales team can close the opportunity and initiate onboarding once again with data spread across spreadsheets or documents. This means that the onboarding team takes longer to close the process with the challenge of chasing internally and externally for information.
- In both scenarios the customer is dissatisfied and frustrated with the entire process – thus likely to switch to a competitor.
- Repeated data entry: A good platform allows for “Enter data once, reuse many times”. However, with legacy systems, often systems and processes are disconnected – causing repeated requests for data and duplicate data capture.
Re-imagining customer onboarding using Power Platform
In the ever-evolving landscape of Financial Services, to thrive, organisations must embrace digital onboarding tailored to their industry. As Will Rogers, infamous American humourist, once said, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression”, so the onset of a long-term customer relationship must be on the right footing.
Detailed below are some common pain points, and how implementing a Power Platform solution can help solve these challenges:
Partnering with Power Platform: Your path to customer onboarding excellence
Microsoft Dynamics 365 allows users to revolutionise the customer onboarding process and experience. With automated internal processes and the minimisation of paper and manual tasks, Microsoft Dynamics 365 can be leveraged to streamline and automate the process of bringing new customers into your business ecosystem.”
To learn more about our experience in transforming the customer onboarding process, watch our Virgin Money video case study. To level up your customer onboarding experience, contact us today.