When considering new technology for your company’s client and employee onboarding process, it’s essential that the solution adds more pros than cons.
As 74% of organizations report that they have plans to maintain or implement a permanent hybrid work model with a significant portion of staff working either fully or mostly remote, companies should focus on digitizing and streamlining processes traditionally conducted through in-person meetings and the delivery of hard copy documents.
Among these, onboarding – both for employees and clients – stands out as a prime candidate for digital renovation. The average company onboarding process involves 54 separate tasks, the majority of which are completed on paper. When employees experience a smooth onboarding process that they feel is thorough but not excessive, 69% of the time they will remain with the company for at least three years.
An effective onboarding process should help new employees and clients learn what they need to know in order to perform their jobs or use a business's services. It should also guide them through the process of delivering the information required to get things started. It’s not a case where less is necessarily more. Insufficient onboarding leaves new hires feeling lost in their roles and clients unable to get the most out of the services they require.
Whether lengthy or brief, an effective onboarding process is a managed experience. When it works well, new hires and clients receive what they need, and are able to provide what is needed by the organization – either by tasks to complete or requests for information – in an orderly, transparent fashion and have the right tools to complete the process hassle-free.
Here are four ways technology can improve and streamline your onboarding processes.
Companies spend a lot of unnecessary time during the onboarding process collecting documents, signatures, and verified IDs. Digitizing and automating these phases significantly streamline the process, allowing new hires and clients to focus on the tasks they need to complete.
Document portals can automate document digital signature collection, replacing email and hard copy exchange. They provide a secure connection to a single, organized repository where users can monitor progress and set up automated reminders for important deadlines.
ID verification in processes such as financial transactions or obtaining medical records can be a tiresome manual task. Today, solutions-based AI and machine learning automate many verification tasks. AIs can cross reference known verified data with the newly provided information, using computer vision to match ID photos and cross-check the same data points referenced in different documents.
The employee onboarding experience sets the tone for a relationship that could last years or just a few weeks. Studies indicate that few companies invest in designing a high-quality onboarding experience as 88% of polled office workers say their experience was either difficult and tedious or insufficient in preparing them for success in their roles.
Indeed 94% of HR professionals admit that since the shift to being remote increased, they cannot account for the progress or satisfaction of approximately 10% of new hires. Investing in the employee onboarding experience is a strategy that will pay off in the long run in increased overall employee satisfaction and loyalty.
New clients exhibit similar preferences to new hires. They want onboarding to be convenient but thorough. Among polled consumers, 86% say that they are more inclined to stay with brands and services that offer extensive onboarding educational content, empowering them to get the most out of what they pay for.
In sectors such as legal and financial, onboarding often requires clients to submit a large portfolio of documents and data that enable the services requested. Automated, self-service options such as document portals significantly improve the onboarding experience from the customer’s perspective.
Introducing new technologies into already complicated tech stacks can produce a variety of outcomes in terms of efficiency and the satisfaction of users and clients. In today’s digitally transformed world, companies use on average 110 different software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms in some capacity. While some of the services play well with others – offering code-free integration – most don’t. Those who don’t either introduce data siloes that prevent unified top-down visibility into company data as a whole or they require expensive custom-coded integrations.
When considering new technology solutions – either for your company’s onboarding process or any other pain points that require the revaluation of a process – it’s essential to verify that the solution doesn’t introduce more complexity than the problem. To that end, you should always confirm that SaaS solutions come with out-of-the-box code-free integrations for the services you already rely on and that they simplify the overall user experience, reducing the number of front-end interfaces that must be navigated to complete a task.
FileInvite’s secure document collection and client portal platform can ease pain points across your onboarding process. Using FileInvite, new hires and clients can upload requested documents via secure channels to a single repository, while using the device of their choice– laptop, mobile, or tablet.
To learn more and request a demo, visit FileInvite today.
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