How to accelerate your customer onboarding with data automation

Think back to the last time you onboarded a new customer.

How long did it take you to get them set up? How many engineers did you need to write all the custom code? What kind of technical expertise did you need to connect to their disparate sources and migrate their data over to your systems? There’s no denying it – customer data onboarding is a difficult and demanding process.

But luckily, you can get your customers set up without causing a bottleneck for your operations. Data automation is a fast efficient way to onboard customers without the technical hassle. Let’s take a closer look at how it works.

The power of data automation

As a SaaS business, you’ve likely experienced having to build bespoke, hand-coded processes to onboard your customers' data. The problem being, the amount of custom code you end up with. This leaves you with bloated data processes and an unhealthy amount of technical debt moving forward.

And even when you get through those complex, slow manual steps, you might still encounter complications. For example, a customer’s database formats might have changed making ingestion more difficult. Or, you might need data from another system that you don’t have access to.

From this process, you’ll find you’re facing similar issues with every single customer. And that you’re following the same basic steps, over and over, to get them set up. This makes your onboarding processes prime candidates for automation. With the right data platform, you can build automated workflows that handle these repeatable steps for you. This means you can connect to your customer’s data sources, transform data to the format you need, and migrate customers in a more streamlined way.

Let’s look at CloverDX customer Zywave as an example. Zywave is an InsurTech company that provides software solutions for insurance brokers. One of their main goals in improving their customer data onboarding process was to free up their engineers’ time. The automation CloverDX enabled them to implement cut the time it took the engineers to convert data by 25% or more for each new customer. If your conversions are taking five days to complete, shaving a day off is a huge benefit to your teams.

Automation speeds up your data processes and means your engineering teams spend less time on repeatable, manual tasks and can refocus their talents on processes that aid your business development. The processes you build are also repeatable, saving you more time in the future. But that’s not the only benefit of data automation.

Why you should take the automated approach

• Running automatic data validation to catch errors and improve data quality. This ensures records are correct and trustworthy when you migrate them over. As a result, you can avoid customer concerns being triggered by unexpected data issues.
• Automatically adjust to variations in data. Using a data platform with automation capabilities means you can adapt to your customer’s needs. No matter the source or the format, you can easily connect to their business applications and migrate data effectively.
• Remove the need for large amounts of code. Once you've got a data ingestion framework, you don't need to rebuild the process from scratch for each new client, you only need to adjust for client-specific rules. This not only makes onboarding faster, but means your less-experienced staff can do it too.
• Increase precision. Automation provides you with standardized processes. You’ll reduce the likelihood of human error and provide a precise and accurate onboarding process each and every time.
• Improve the customer experience. Automation frees up your senior engineers and developers to help with any issues that might arise in the onboarding process. This means that if problems do happen, you’ve got your best staff on hand to solve them and provide a seamless experience for your new customer.
• Enhance customer loyalty. Using data automation helps you meet your customer’s expectations by offering them a fast and flexible onboarding process. This will lead to a better overall experience, helping you to foster a stronger long-term relationship. And, customers who have a positive experience are more likely to remain loyal.
• Helps you address wider data problems in your organization. By assessing your entire customer onboarding process and identifying opportunities for automation, you’ll address larger data concerns in your own processes. For example, you might notice similarities between the migrations you do for new customers and those you do internally. You can then apply similar automation workflows to improve your own processes.

Accelerating success with automation

If you’re finding your customer data onboarding process a struggle, it might be time to look into automating many of the repeatable steps. Data automation delights your new clients with low wait times and error-free data management.

But before you get to that point, you’ve got to choose the right data automation partner to get you started. With a tool like CloverDX, you’ll have universal connectivity to work with any number of customer data sources. Once you’ve got your data, you can build intuitive, automated data pipelines that you can reuse for future client relationships. To see how CloverDX can help you accelerate your customer onboarding, book a demo today.