Today people expect things to happen at a much faster pace than ever before. Instant gratification has become nearly the norm. That should seem obvious. So, along those lines, keeping your customers waiting to have their data onboarded is no different. But forcing everything to just go “faster” for the sake of faster can leave you with a myriad of problems down the road.
Unfortunately, many people aren’t fully aware of what “data onboarding” includes. As a result, the entire process isn’t taken into account when certain checkpoints are positioned for customer onboarding. It’s the process of importing required customer data to a new SaaS. Data might be sourced from a number of places such as a previous software vendor, importing from a demand side platform, spreadsheets, csv files, or activity logs.
The Customer Is Always Right
Data needs to be migrated into a company’s product before the customer sees any value. Marketing automation can’t be set up without CRM lead data. Ecommerce products can’t be sold without inventory SKUs. Just as HR cannot complete payroll without accurate employee data, customer onboarding that leads to customer retention isn’t complete without a full and thorough data migration and data enhancement.
While data onboarding is an obvious and critical piece of the overall customer onboarding process, it usually is neglected and occasionally outright ignored completely. Customer frustration around the data onboarding experience has been mounting for companies of all shapes and sizes, from startups to large enterprises, seemingly without any true innovation being added to the process.
Avoid Getting Stuck In A Rut
This lack of innovation can cause problems in numerous different areas. Engineering teams sometimes become temporary data onboarding experts assigned to figure out why uploaded files aren’t working and take on janitorial data duty, cleaning files to ensure a successful import, instead of spending time building core product features. But more importantly, these problems can be passed onto the customers. Customers can become easily frustrated as they attempt to figure out how best to upload their data via uncertain or complicated templates. Vague error messages become common as they try to posit data accurately to be submitted correctly.
As we continue to grow into a fully digital-based world, data becomes the key driver in most everything we do. Clean, current, customer data is essential, which is why understanding the importance of data onboarding is critical for any company. If not handled correctly, the data onboarding process can become a serious barrier to adoption both internally and externally.
