According to McKinsey & Company, the average onboarding process for a new corporate client can take up to 100 days. That’s a significant investment of time and money for any business.
If not run the right way, clients can walk away frustrated, wasting valuable resources and time.
To overcome customer onboarding challenges, businesses should look for a solution designed specifically to support the end-to-end journey.
While today’s project management tools sound like the right answer to streamline the onboarding process and may very well be a step up from the traditional spreadsheet approach, their features are often limited in scope to satisfy the complex needs of customer onboarding.
Without the needed components specific to the onboarding process, customer onboarding teams are left to grapple with the need to monitor communication and timelines, provide customer support, and train customers throughout the process.
Today, we'll dig into why project management tools might not be the perfect piece to the client onboarding puzzle.
We'll look at the limitations of these tools and how purpose-designed onboarding solutions can offer a comprehensive solution to help you overcome these challenges and streamline customer onboarding.
Why aren't project management tools a good fit for client onboarding?
Project management tools are designed to organize and manage projects and tasks. Still, there are major limitations when using them to the customer onboarding process.
1. Is project management software for internal or external use?
Separating customer tasks and visibility while ensuring no other internal or client data is shared with your customer takes effort.
You risk exposing your customers to the “laundry” of your internal processes and other items that, at best, will be irrelevant and waste the customers’ time and, at worst, disclose information about internal operations or potentially other clients that they are not intended to see.
Modern onboarding solutions, such as Setuply, create easy-to-access communication channels that make exchanging information and asking questions as easy as possible for all relevant team members.
2. Limited ability to personalize the experience for each customer
After all, not every customer is the same. Without a way to customize each onboarding journey based on individual needs, customers will become frustrated and disengaged during the process.
Buyers of all shapes and sizes will have unique preferences, requirements, and expectations. A project management tool can't cater to the different operation styles of each customer, leaving onboarding teams with a one-size-fits-all approach.
Finding a tool that can be tweaked and tailored to the individual onboarding experience is critical, with 58% of customers saying they must receive a personalized experience when interacting with a vendor.
3. The customer learning curve on yet another product
Modern project management software can be very sophisticated and complex to learn to use. There is often a learning curve for the actual user, such as the member of staff of the solution provider, to learn and become proficient.
Expecting customers to become familiar with a whole other software offering before they can start using the one they paid for sounds like a recipe for even more frustration :)
Instead, purpose-built customer onboarding solutions provide new customers with automated tools that will allow them to easily understand how your business works and how you can better serve them.
4. Fragmented collaboration across onboarding teams and customers
Communication between onboarding teams and their customers is essential for successful onboarding. However, staying up to date on action items, tasks, timelines, and customer requirements can be challenging with a project management tool.
Project management tools are designed to manage projects but not necessarily support communication between onboarding teams and their customers. As such, it's difficult for these tools to ensure that all stakeholders involved in the onboarding process have the necessary information when needed.
The feedback loop is vital in refining client onboarding methods, and today's tools lack an ideal system to do so effectively.
There are many moving parts involved in client onboarding, and keeping track of it all can be difficult with a project management tool as your central solution for customer onboarding.
5. Managing customer data using project management tool is futile
One of the key elements of complexity in onboarding customers onto the B2B SaaS solutions is the amount of data that has to be collected, validated, reconfigured, and uploaded onto the new solutions provider’s offering.
Think about the effort to migrate onto a new payroll solution - the historical payrolls, employee data, and other things that must be migrated. Typical project management software is not designed for that. Integrating information from multiple data sources ensures you can easily verify the data's accuracy and create a real-time platform to pull in information.
Specialized customer onboarding solutions help securely collect customer data and integrate with your customer's other platforms, including HubSpot, Salesforce, and more.
6. Creating scalable customer onboarding is a process :)
Most projects managed on a project management software are one-and-done deals. Their primary objective is to map out and execute an extensive set of tasks and activities for a project to ensure no ball gets dropped.
There is little opportunity to view onboarding projects as an iterative process - requiring ongoing analysis, search for the bottlenecks, and continuous improvement. These tools might be able to provide basic reporting capabilities and track timelines, but they can’t give a complete picture of performance. Without analytics and tracking software usage, customer onboarding teams will struggle to evaluate the success of their customer onboarding process.
How a purpose built customer onboarding solution can help streamline the entire process
An onboarding platform is a comprehensive solution for managing, tracking, and optimizing such processes. It provides features that can automate communication, personalized experiences, and insight into customer experiences. A solution provider must ensure that your customer's onboarding experience is as seamless as possible and requires no additional training.
What does this mean? You need a customized onboarding solution that ensures your customers won't spend too much effort trying to figure it out. A simple, streamlined, and automated onboarding experience allows your customers to concentrate on the benefits your company can deliver, not making sure they know how to use technological tools for onboarding.
With client onboarding automation software, onboarding teams can speed up the onboarding process, ensuring that everyone involved is always up to date.
It allows customer onboarding teams to tailor customer experiences based on individual needs. This lets teams personalize each customer's journey, driving customer engagement and improving their overall onboarding experience.
Experience the Difference Automated Customer Onboarding Can Make With Setuply
Off-the-shelf project management solutions meant for internal project management— not result-based onboarding — are unsuitable for companies committed to better customer success and experiences. Using the wrong tools will increase the odds of losing a customer almost as soon as you get them.
Your customers and business deserve customer onboarding tools specifically created to reduce friction and increase the ease with which a customer ramps up with your organization. Setuply provides specific data management, integrations, and professional services automation, allowing you to achieve these vital goals and reduce customer churn!
Ready to learn more? Connect with our team today and learn how we can help improve your onboarding processes and customer satisfaction.
