Client Onboarding: An Important Step in a Successful Journey

The efficiency and effectiveness of your client onboarding process can demonstrate its usefulness.

When users spend a great deal of time collecting onboarding data, the drain on a user’s time means they have less time to spend on revenue-generating activities. When data is housed solely in an onboarding solution, the information that can’t be shared between systems is lost for processes performed outside of the onboarding software.

But client onboarding is an important and necessary process. So how can your company avoid the pitfalls while profiting from the benefits?

What is Client Onboarding?

So how does one define client onboarding?

Client onboarding is the critical process of welcoming new clients to your business, collecting important or key information about their profile, needs, and goals, and discussing the appropriate services for their needs. Every region and company has specific requirements for onboarding that dictate the information that needs to be collected, based around regulatory compliance and best practices.

Benefits of Successful Client Onboarding

For many financial services firms, client onboarding has traditionally been a paper-based process, but this is changing with the benefits of software and automation. A successful onboarding process now factors in checking for errors, approval routing, streamlining data capture and form completion, and dynamic processes that allow you to ask the questions that are specific to the client. All of this saves time for your users while improving the process for the clients.

A successful onboarding process can also help your company identify VIP clients or highly active clients from the outset. This allows you to plan for more extensive service, more frequent client touch points, or unique and specific sets of goals. Because the information you gathered immediately identified the needs of the client, your advisors or Relationship Managers are equipped with everything they need to increase revenue and provide the best customer service.

Why does Client Onboarding Matter?

When you lose a client, all of the time and money invested in acquiring them and developing a relationship with them is lost. It’s commonly known that it costs 5 times as much to attract a new customer as it does to keep an existing one. Client retention, therefore, has a massive impact on the success of any company. Despite this, 44% of companies have a greater focus on acquisition, only 18% focus on retention, and only 40% of companies (and 30% of agencies) having an equal focus on acquisition and retention.[1] Onboarding is often seen as an exclusive part of client acquisition, but it can have an impact on retention too. By collecting the right information about your clients, and having that information available as you continue to provide them service, you can improve retention. By leveraging the information gathered in the onboarding process, and continuously working with the most up to date content and tracking along a single, continuous journey for your client, you have a much more complete and holistic picture of your client, their assets, financial history, and their goals.

How Does NexJ Handle Client Onboarding?

So, how can financial services companies complete client onboarding processes quickly? How can they leverage all of the information gathered? Or avoid manual procedures and time-consuming copy-and-paste exercises? Or ensure their information is correct and not duplicated?

The best solution is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application that includes onboarding capabilities. Through NexJ’s integrated CRM application, firms can use onboarding data in the same way they use data from any other source.

NexJ’s onboarding capabilities have been built around the philosophy that onboarding should be a part of the overall management of a client, and therefore, a part of CRM software. Because of this philosophy, NexJ provides onboarding capabilities integrated into our overall application. By choosing an onboarding application that integrates seamlessly with your CRM, you are choosing an entirely comprehensive, best-of-breed solution.

Thinking strategically around your onboarding plans are part of an overall consideration of the lifecycle of your clients. By making onboarding an initial step in the complete process of servicing and managing your clients, you are starting a cohesive journey for them that will provide them with the best possible advice and information based on their unique needs.

Another reason to consider onboarding as part of a larger CRM solution is because it gives you the opportunity to make your software grow with your company and work for you. For example, features such as NexJ’s Comprehensive Customer View, which combines all of the information about a client into a single source of truth, can display not only onboarding information, but also any information collected about the client for the entire time the client is with your company. So, as the client ages, their needs and goals change, and new life events happen, and CRM can help you not only keep track of that, but also to predict it and respond to it in the best possible way.

Client onboarding will always be a key component in client service and compliance. By making a strategic choice to do your onboarding within a larger system, such as NexJ CRM, you can plan ahead to use the information gathered to your advantage.

For more information on NexJ’s client onboarding capabilities, talk to us about our award-winning CRM products and Intelligent Customer Management platform today.

[1] https://www.invespcro.com/blog/customer-acquisition-retention/

Author: Adam Edmonds

Vice President, Products

With almost 2 decades of experience developing customer management solutions in financial services and insurance, Adam Edmonds is responsible for establishing overall product vision and designing easy to use solutions that solve real market problems.

Adam is excited to share the lessons he has learned and his insights on where the industry is heading with readers of his blog. He encourages readers to join the discussion or reach out to him with their own insights, best practices, and solutions to industry challenges.