If there’s one mantra in the global digital economy, it’s that data is the new currency. For any software company looking to grow its customer base, leveraging data is more important than ever.
However, as data keeps growing in volume and complexity worldwide, onboarding customer data from multiple sources to activate users can be more complex than you might think.
Most businesses only realize the challenges in data onboarding after spending weeks or months manually formatting, validating, and cleaning customer data.
This slow process has become the norm for so many businesses that they often overlook the opportunity to speed it up.
A poor data onboarding process can take time and resources that you could be putting towards your core product, and it can turn customers away by delaying their onboarding.
With this guide, you can deploy data onboarding as a lever for growth. Learn more about why data onboarding matters—and how to make it work for your business with the right technology.
Picture this: A fast-growing software company has signed a new customer. To start the onboarding process, the customer success (CS) managers or onboarding specialists must import the customer’s data into the system.
Here’s how the data onboarding process unfolds:
This is just one scenario of how companies across the globe approach customer data onboarding. Others include coding custom data import scripts or native integrations for recurring data imports from specific systems. At the same time, managing data in Excel or CSV sheets is still widespread across different sectors, which only adds to the complexity for software vendors.
Whether carried out internally or by the customers themselves, a manual customer data onboarding process is prone to errors and inefficiency. In the long run, it can erode customer trust by blocking your resources from more strategic initiatives. Let’s take a closer look at why understanding the impact of inefficient data onboarding early on is crucial for businesses on track for growth.
Traditional data onboarding means CS managers or onboarding specialists spend substantial time manually importing, validating, and cleaning data rather than guiding customers through setup. This inefficiency can lead to longer resolution times for customer issues and a slower adoption rate.
Developers often find themselves tasked with integrating and formatting data from various sources to ensure compatibility with the software—draining their time that they could better spend on coding, testing, and improving the core product.
The need to allocate developer resources to manual data onboarding tasks can disrupt product development timelines. Instead of implementing new features, developers must handle data-related issues, delaying product updates or releases.
Managing large volumes of customer data across the organization manually is hardly sustainable. Putting pressure on teams to reformat or restructure data for each new customer, or developing custom scripts for data import, calls for substantial human resources—making scaling slow and costly.
With manual data onboarding, there's a risk of errors and inconsistencies, which inevitably harms the user experience (UX). For example, if file uploads repeatedly fail due to inaccurate data, you might delay or prevent user activation altogether—prompting frustrated customers to look for other solutions.
When customers churn because of poor data onboarding experiences, it directly affects sales and revenue—fewer satisfied customers mean fewer new sales and renewals. As your resources decline, future investments become increasingly difficult, limiting business growth in the long run.
The outlined effects make it clear that a strategic focus on data onboarding is key for driving growth. Integrating a seamless data onboarding process into your customer onboarding strategy can save you time and resources for what truly moves the needle. Add to that smart automation, and you can effectively address the triple constraint in data onboarding.
Thanks to AI-enahanced automation technology, you can rest assured that your data onboarding process is faster, of higher quality, and more cost-effective than ever. Let’s see how.
As we’ve already seen, automation is at the heart of data onboarding. AI advancements take the process further and streamline it by learning your needs from the initial data import.
Leveraging automation and AI within a data onboarding solution allows you to adapt to evolving data import needs—all while staying focused on providing value to customers quickly and efficiently.
Data onboarding technology significantly cuts the time needed to onboard new customers by automating data imports. This way, for example, a construction management software company can readily bring together project details for site managers to plan and track resources, equipment, deadlines, etc.
A data onboarding solution can handle various data formats effortlessly—from CSV and Excel to JSON, XML, and PDF—making it straightforward for companies like ecommerce platforms to consolidate product information from suppliers who might use different data file formats. This helps them ensure that the product catalog stays current without human intervention.
Automating data validation and cleaning through data onboarding technology ensures higher data quality with fewer chances for errors. For instance, business users in sustainability management can easily standardize and validate greenhouse gas emissions from multiple locations to ensure accuracy before integrating them into their systems, reducing the risk of distorted sustainability records.
With more time, seamless workflows, and increased data quality, your teams no longer need to handle every data import internally. This improved setup gives them leverage to encourage customers to import data directly into your system. By offering self-service data imports through a user-friendly interface, you ensure an even better customer experience.
You can access all these benefits and beyond with nuvo, a German-based data onboarding technology provider bringing innovation to the market with its Data Importer SDK, powered by AI.
Forward-thinking businesses worldwide trust nuvo to simplify the onboarding process for diverse datasets in compliance with GDPR—improving time to value for customers, increasing customer satisfaction, and scaling for growth.
The global HR and payroll platform Lano is one of many companies that could minimize errors and save resources by reducing human involvement in data imports.
Previously requiring a full working day, data imports at Lano now only take one hour thanks to nuvo’s Data Importer SDK—an impressive time saving of 90%.
Providing seamless data onboarding experiences with nuvo saves you time and resources for your business while customers access the value of your product from the beginning.
If you're ready to discover nuvo’s innovative solutions, book a call with our team, and we will be happy to support you every step of the way.
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