Building a Better Onboarding Experience
Your sales department must add new clients – and they’re performing at record numbers. The C-Suite doesn’t understand why these clients aren’t onboarded more quickly, and the technology department can’t keep up with the demand. The answer isn’t fewer sales or resetting client expectations – it’s building better, more efficient import processes.
Imports into a SaaS platform generally occur for two reasons: new clients currently using a different platform or existing clients who need to migrate from your legacy platform to your new platform. If these processes are well built, they can improve the onboarding experience and positively impact revenue. I worked with one client that had a 140-day onboarding process. They were, in effect, only influencing revenue for the current year for the first six months. Everything else would impact the following year.
There are several vital mistakes teams make when building an import tool. While it may not be obvious, moving backward in time has several benefits and can help you create a “15-minute” onboarding experience. The most recent customer data is imported first and will likely have fewer issues than 5-7 year-old data. The problems with older data could fill a book. Don’t start there because it will delay customer onboarding.
If you operate a B2B SaaS platform, creating a multi-threaded import process that allows parallel threads should enable you to migrate multiple clients simultaneously. This process will optimize the manual steps completed by your Implementation Team while ensuring minimal impact on your online platform.
Another critical feature is merging data instead of requiring an empty database or customer “shell.” Customers that migrate often want to see their data in the new platform, train with it, validate it, and verify reports. If the migration process is expensive, destroying and recreating the customer account can be cost-prohibitive. This process can be architected with the multi-threaded ability to add this capability easily.
Take time to think about not just the structure of what it will do and how it works, but how to bring new clients and their data in with the least amount of disruption to your system and your clients – this forward-thinking will save your company time, money, and reduce your tech debt.