I’m sure that anyone who has worked in one or many functional departments across the business landscape has encountered the excitement of closing a successful sales deal with a new customer – this moment is often the fruit of months of effort across the business, from lead generation to sales effort, culminating with a signature on the dotted line and subsequent processing by the finance team.
Sales and customer onboarding is something that every business encounters but it’s safe to say that within many organisations, the process of successfully onboarding a customer is often very manual, with a distinct lack of control and takes a lot longer than it should. I’ve worked in a few different industries during my career to date and there are often varying degrees of chaos between a deal coming in and the customer successfully paying for their purchase, often with negative knock-on effects for the team as a whole.
I’ll touch on a few of the key parts of the process that can and should be automated within this process, for the benefit of the organization and the employees who are ultimately living the process.
- Creating a customer onboarding portal using a combination of internal or client facing forms combined with routing and workflow is a way to cut out a large amount of the paperwork and email that is evident in most sales processes. Some of the benefits of this kind of portal include the reduction of human error, appropriate approval processes and robust reporting, to name just a few.
- Making use of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to move data and information between systems and to automate tasks that a human would normally do. An example in one of our video demos at jaam automation outlines how a robot looks up a customer from an online public record (such as Companies House) and seamlessly transitions this data back into the data fields of the forms within the customer portal.
- Utilizing data integration technology to bring legacy systems closer together and connect data that would otherwise need to be pushed and pulled manually between databases and repositories.
- Using Document Automation and Digital Signature technology to utilize the data within your CRM and customer portal to gather information and create both customer facing and internal documents within the onboarding process. No more paper passing over the desk of the Finance Director!
There are so many advantages to automating this part of your business which makes it strange to think that not that many companies are at a mature stage of automating this process – a few of these include:
- Accelerating processing time and accuracy.
- Showcasing robust controls to your internal and external audit teams.
- Managing touchpoints to improve both your team’s experience and the customer journey.
- Improving processes surrounding regulatory controls.
- Reducing management overhead within manual processes.
At jaam, we help organizations with these and many other types of automation challenges and we’d love to help you and your company brainstorm how to kick off your automation journey. Take a look at the video on this page below for a great overview of this process and how we can solve these challenges for you and your team.