Best Practices for How to Successfully Onboard New Customers Digitally

So you’ve just landed that new customer you’ve been courting for almost a year — great! But, before you celebrate closing the contract, you should first consider your new customer onboarding process. Does it involve a lot of printing, signing, scanning, emailing, and maybe even physical delivery of documents? How long does it take to onboard that new customer? Days? Weeks?

If your organization is coping with cumbersome customer onboarding, it’s probably time to upgrade to a digital experience. Why? Because the more trouble and time it takes for that new customer to complete paperwork, the more time they have to reevaluate the relationship. They might even find a competitor whose new customer onboarding process is much more streamlined than yours.

If you’re worried about the scenario above, we’ve got three digital onboarding best practices to overhaul how quickly you can get new customers in the door and start generating revenue:

The more you can automate the new customer onboarding process, the better. Choose a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, for example, that allows you to autofill information you already have about your new customer, such as the organization’s address, EIN, and key contacts. If you combine that with a document productivity platform that provides guided form filling or fillable PDF documents, your new customer doesn’t have to print or scan documents and can complete customer onboarding processes digitally.

One of the best benefits of converting to digital onboarding is the capacity to accept eSignatures. Skip the burdensome process of obtaining physical signatures (often from multiple parties), which requires printing and scanning numerous documents. And instead, adopt an eSigning solution that let’s you and your customers eSign documents in seconds using any web browser.

Make sure your digital onboarding process takes remote communication and collaboration into consideration. Use a document productivity solution that allows you to electronically share, track, highlight, review, and update documents — so if stakeholders are in different locations, they can all work off the same version. This will avoid potential duplication and save a lot of back and forth between you and the customer.

As more and more organizations begin the transition either back to the physical office or continue with a remote work environment, the ability to onboard new customers digitally is more critical than ever. Secure document sharing, remote collaboration, and eSigning capabilities are critical components of business operations. If you want to win and retain new customers, it’s important your onboarding process is up to speed.