London leads the way for growth but risks abound
by Rory Traynor
First impressions count, which is why onboarding is such a critical moment in the customer relationship.
It’s the moment you get to prove to the customer that your service is right for them, and it sets the tone for the entire future relationship.
Unfortunately it’s also one of the most challenging stages in the customer journey, with several pitfalls and hurdles that could leave your new client wondering why they bothered to change supplier in the first place – not to mention the headaches and extra work it creates for your business.
In this article, we’re going to take a look at the challenges that onboarding presents, as well as how Red Flag Alert’s data can help you to turn them into an advantage over your competitors.
Time Is Money: The Challenges
The main difficulties in onboarding mainly revolve around delivering a great customer experience while maintaining efficiency.
Time-Consuming
Having a thorough process for checks like anti-money laundering and creditworthiness are vital in order to minimise risk to your business. However, going through this process for each individual customer takes up huge amounts of resources. Worse still, some potential customers are borderline cases that are much harder to assess and require additional investigation.
Hassle
If your business has a long gap between the customer signing up and them being fully onboarded –for example, if a previous contract has to expire first – you may find that their circumstances have changed by the time they come to use your services. This means going back to the beginning and restarting the process or relying on old information.
Cost
Some businesses have entire teams dedicated to onboarding customers. While this is no doubt faster, the initial set-up and ongoing costs attached to having this additional capability can make onboarding very expensive.
Customer Satisfaction
A lengthy onboarding process isn’t just inconvenient for your business – it’s frustrating for your customers, too. This could make them less likely to renew with you or even fail to complete the onboarding process. Worst of all, they may tell others about their poor experience.
Make Your Onboarding More Efficient
Making your onboarding process more efficient has several advantages. Happy customers are more likely to buy more from you – they’ll recommend your business, you’ll make a profit from them quicker, and you’ll avoid customer churn.
Red Flag Alert offers a perfect onboarding solution that saves your business time and money while allowing you to provide your customers with a fast and seamless service.
We provide up-to-the-minute data on all of the UK’s 6.5 million businesses and publish 190,000 updates with over 100 indicators of financial health every day.
Here are some of the ways this can help make your onboarding process more efficient:
Minimise Credit Checks
Our health check system makes quick judgements on the creditworthiness of a business. This means that large numbers of customers can be accepted or rejected automatically, providing you with more time to focus on borderline cases.
Red Flag Alert can also be used to run credit checks at the prospecting stage, so that only those businesses with suitable financial health will be passed on to the sales team
Monitor Changes
Red Flag Alert can provide monitoring alerts that update you if a client’s financial health changes. These can be integrated into your CRM to trigger automated actions on the billing system and/or send notifications to team members.
Double Down on Compliance
Red Flag Alert features a comprehensive AML service that covers everything from ID verification to secure audit trails. This means that these previously onerous processes can be completed quickly and discreetly.
We also help you remain GDPR compliant, providing a master data management (MDM) process and helping to track and manage your data.
Delight Your Customers
The result of the benefits listed above is efficiency, meaning that customers will experience minimal inconvenience and will be able to use your product or service faster.
This high-quality, fast and professional approach will set the tone for future relationships and keep customers coming back.
One Solution for All Your Onboarding Needs
In this article, we’ve seen how Red Flag Alert’s high-quality and up-to-date data gives your company an advantage over your competitors in terms of both efficiency and user experience.
However, it doesn’t end there. We can also support your sales process, helping you to identify suitable prospects and giving your team high-quality leads.
All of this is provided for one flat rate that includes all support, plus bespoke configuration for seamless integration into your systems.
Our detailed business information offers:
- Up-to-date information on over 6.5 million businesses in the UK
- 50,000+ new businesses every month
- 100,000+ updates every day
- Over 20 million key decision-makers
- Over 100 data points on every business
- 7 financial health ratings
Our AML service offers:
- Full range of risk level checking
- Unbeatable match rates
- ID verification
- Enhanced due diligence
- Sanctions and PEPs real-time screening
- Monitoring alerts
- Simple interface
- Secure audit trail
To find out how our Onboarding capabilities can help your business, why not get a free trial today?
