Automation Potential in: Onboarding Customers
low Potential to Automate:
Negotiate pricing with terms and conditions, Managing customer contracts
Medium Potential to automate:
Review and accept customer applications, Manage terms and conditions
High potential to automate
Create and update product master, Set up a customer in system, Manage customer data, Create and manage reports
today's Challenges
Onboarding a new customer is your first opportunity to create a good impression. When customers interact with you they don’t want manual processes, tedious paperwork, and lengthy approval times. Powering a customer onboarding process that is digital in natur, and available 24/7, can make up the beginning of a successful relationship with your customers.
automation Impact evaluation
Create and update customer master data
Recent regulation (GDPR) has highlighted the need and value of an up-to-date customer database, but also the time and effort involved in upkeep. Robotic Process Automation is a particularly useful tool in onboarding customers, as it can work with disparate systems to gather information and match them against predefined criteria. Where key information is missing/incorrect then this can be instantly be notified to your team. Automation can also be used to verify that current information is accurate or keep an eye on key contacts. For example in B2B a bot could check a customers’ linkedin profile, see if they have moved onto a new opportunity and then update the CRM. This can ensure you never lose clients because your key contact has moved on.
Create standard reports
Where customer data is needed for reporting purposes it may often be combined with data from sales, order processing or other. This is another area where RPA can go into different systems or files, extract information and then populate a dashboard or similiar. The advantage with a bot doing this is the speed and availability allow you to have live data 24/7.
Review and accept customer applications
This processes could be automated but its very dependent on the complexity of the information needed for approval. If there were a series of basic if/then questions that could be applied to a customer application then it is possible a bot could handle this process, but where several factors have different weights this may not be possible.
Manage terms and conditions
Where a certain product/service has a standard set of terms and conditions it may be possible to have a bot customise these to suit the name, address etc of the end client. Where terms and conditions are of a more bespoke nature, this makes it more likely you’ll need manual oversight.
Processes such as managing terms and conditions and negotiating price have a low potential for automation as the level of thought required simply cannot be achieved by software at this point.
case Study
National Bank
Our client, a national bank, where experiencing serious issues remaining competitive against purely digital startups. They had been one of the first organisations to embrace technology and online services, but now needed to refresh, update and upgrade that offering and were looking to automation for gains in a number of areas, including customer onboarding.
The bank had a wide range of different systems with a number of bespoke applications in play each assigned to different verticals and different locations. They knew they needed one single source of truth but the cost and timescale of implementing a new ERP made it unrealistic where the business needed quick wins to prevent a loss of market share.
This coordinated data will help employees to provide responses to customers in near real time, with a view to accelerate customer onboarding from 59 days to just nine days. The organisation saw a return on their investment in 12 months but moreover this gave them the capability of a new ERP in months instead of years.