Customer Onboarding Processes Can Make (or Break) Your Business
Customer onboarding is supposed to be an exciting moment – an opportunity to welcome new customers into your family.
For most businesses there’s two sides to onboarding.
The human aspects show off what makes your company unique: new customers are handed off a customer service person, and in many companies, an onboarding manager takes the customer through customization, training and the other persona-specific aspects of onboarding. Done right, your customer leaves this experience happy they’ve signed the contract and ready to go.
Then there’s the other side of onboarding most of us dread: bogged down by inefficient processes that frustrate customers and staff alike.
Automated emails asking for yet another web form to be completed – often with many of the same details provided elsewhere.
Printing, signing, scanning and emailing documents that customers loathe every step of the way.
Paperwork galore, e-signatures, unclear instructions, corrections and requests for more information… and even send or receive information by fax.
A fax? In 2025? ???
As painful as this is for the customer, it can be even worse internally as this information is manually copied, duplicated and managed across multiple systems.
Errors go beyond onboarding; customers who make the effort to share their preferences see them ignored and the excitement of the new relationship erodes.
Every aspect of customer onboarding needs to be human-centric.
If your onboarding systems rely on manual steps or disconnected systems, the cracks become impossible to ignore.
It’s tempting to view these problems as one-offs as they arise. Or even to attribute them to customers who don’t “get it.”
But the root cause of all these problems is a process that’s nowhere near as seamless and “happy path” as marketing or sales may have made it seem.
Most onboarding processes are built on a series of disconnected systems.
There’s one set of tools that automate emails, another that holds all the information from the pre-sales and sales process, and yet another that manages customer data in the product.
Adding all these tools was an innocent and honest attempt to fill a gap: each one on its own promised productivity and efficiency gains.
But as they’ve come together, the whole has never been greater than the sum of its parts.
And in some cases, far less.
First impressions for customers that cause them to leave before you’ve been able to maximize the upfront cost to acquire a new customer – let alone maximize the lifetime value (LTV) of their potential relationship with your business.
This is the point where someone in the organization “helpfully” asks if AI can solve this problem.
The suggestion makes sense.
Most executives have a clear vision for how technology should drive onboarding.
And the potential of AI has clear applications here – if it works as intended. Automation falls short precisely because of the vision above. The idea that technology should be the driver of the process.
It’s about bringing the people inside your customer into your customer community.
That means the needs of people, both internally and externally, must be at the forefront of any design.
You can automate the onboarding process, but only by first identifying the human needs and using automation to support them.
It’s the difference between basic and intelligent automation.
Intelligent automation replaces the ad-hoc, tool-based approach to automating process with one that radically transforms the customer experience.
Companies who want to realize the potential of automation should think of automated processes as another member of their team – a digital worker.
Doing so keeps the human perspective at the center of any automation effort. In the same way humans are frustrated by siloed work internally, automation can be, too.
The hybrid (digital/human) workforce approach maintains the human aspects of onboarding that exist and reframes the technology as an extension of their capabilities.
Human-centric automation can quickly be deployed across the onboarding process in a few ways:
What’s most critical is how these individual efforts connect with the humans they support.
Each of these efforts must be observable, explainable and accountable, so the hybrid (digital/human) workforce is as collaborative as the human one.
Infocap is the transformational solution partner for companies who want to reach their potential through intelligent automation. Automation in onboarding requires extending human capabilities to scale and support both new and ongoing relationships.
With intelligent automation, your business can welcome new customers with confidence, a friendly brand experience, and ease while being efficient and cost-effective.
This not only sets the stage for long-term growth and significantly longer customer relationships, it transforms the onboarding experience into a larger opportunity for digital transformation.