Is your customer onboarding ROI upside down? Per Forrester, companies can spend up to $25K onboarding a single client, while Wyzeowl indicates 90% feel their vendors coul`tion can rapidly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of their customer onboarding process, all while dramatically improving the customer experience.  The same Wyzowl study highlighting current onboarding challenges also indicates that 86% of customers would be more likely to stay loyal to a business that leverages a welcoming and educational onboarding process.  

Since acquiring a new customer can cost 5-25 times more than retaining an existing one, creating the smoothest onboarding experience possible makes sense.  However, the customer onboarding process at most organizations is labor-intensive, error-prone, inefficient, and riddled with manual departmental “hand-offs” and associated opportunities to “drop the ball.” As such, it is not surprising that 9 in 10 customers feel the onboarding process can be improved.

Fortunately, customer onboarding is one of the top back-office use cases where RPA can quickly improve efficiency, effectiveness, and customer experience. While the customer onboarding experience is unique by company and industry, a typical RPA-enabled onboarding process would flow as follows:

• A bot receives a notification from the CRM system when a new customer sale is finalized and immediately sends an automated “welcome packet” email to the new customer
• A bot orders a new customer appreciation/welcome kit (Ex. postal.io ) to be delivered to the client
• A bot creates internal project plan tasks (ex. Asana, Trello, Wrike) to drive inter-departmental coordination of the onboarding process
• When the customer completes their onboarding information, a bot confirms receipt to the customer and leverages this data to create the customer record in the ERP system and initiate a credit check if/as required
• A bot internally notifies team members (ex., email, intranet, website, etc.) of the new customer acquisition
• Bots assist, as required, in executing the onboarding process. (ex., follow-up with the customer if onboarding documentation is not completed, notifications to stakeholders as tasks are delayed or completed, etc.)
• As internal onboarding milestones are complete, bots send appropriate timely communication to the customer (ex. system access & instructions, training videos, product information, knowledge base links, etc.)
• Bots automatically initiate ongoing notifications for internal stakeholders to regularly check in with new customers to ensure appropriate engagement
• Customer-facing chatbots provide 24/7 self-service for ongoing customer questions or inquiries

Your customer experience starts with your onboarding process and is the foundation for ongoing long-term customer loyalty. As you can see, Robotic Process Automation RPA can rapidly assist in fixing the cracks in your onboarding foundation, helping ensure you have lifelong loyal customers who are champions of your brand.

Contact us to learn more about how to upgrade the ROI of your back-office onboarding process utilizing the power of intelligent automation.