How better data onboarding can help your SaaS business scale

Data onboarding can make or break your customer relationships, and therefore your business.

Think about it: you’ve sold a new customer on the benefits of using your platform, and they’re finally on board with what it can do for them, and then their data enters the equation. After making sense of it, you turn around and tell them one of 3 things:

• We’re going to need you to sort this out before we can ingest the data into the software, thanks.
• We can do this for you, but it’s going to cost you extra, which nobody mentioned to you until now because they didn’t want to lose the deal.
• We can do this for you as part of the onboarding, but your timeline is now 6 months, not 2.

Any of those statements can put a damper on your client relationship before you’ve even begun. But worse than that, all of these issues are holding your business back from scaling the way you want to.

If your customer is handling the data clean-up, you still have to spend time and resource making sure it’s been done to the standard and format you require for ingest.

And if you’re the one doing the data cleansing and transformation, it puts you immediately on a linear growth path instead of scaling, because you will never be able to increase capacity without increasing headcount.

And you’re not alone – the vast majority of SaaS businesses will reach this juncture at some point. So what can you do to solve the problem in a way that creates positive, hassle-free onboarding experiences for your customers without jeopardizing your scalability?

Let’s take a look at some of the most common data onboarding struggles, and how CloverDX works to effortlessly overcome those hurdles in order to help you scale.

It shouldn’t take you months to onboard new data

Customer satisfaction is never helped by lengthy, painful data onboarding – especially when sales is promising a 2-month onboarding period, but the data team has a 6-month backlog. But when it’s the state of the customer’s data that’s causing the backlog, what can you do? Do you ask the customer to clean it up themselves, or do you do it internally, meaning you’re creating a far less scalable process?

As one of our customers put it, “We want customers to follow our spec, but we know a lot of them won’t. How do we find a middle ground? We want something hassle-free for them to use.”

Luckily, CloverDX can offer that hassle-free middle ground for both parties.

CloverDX can connect to data in any format, automatically validate it to pre-approved standards, transform it as needed, and then publish to any format, all in one automated process. This means you can not only avoid needing to hire more people to get data onboarded, but you can reduce the time it takes from months to weeks, or from weeks to days, AND relieve some of the burden from your customers, massively improving customer satisfaction and allowing you to scale more efficiently.

Delayed revenue recognition can be the enemy of your business

If there is delayed revenue recognition in your business, you lose out on massive growth opportunities and can be susceptible to revenue leaks – and nothing delays revenue recognition like lengthy onboarding processes. This can cause major cash flow issues in the business, holding you back from growing the way you want to. 

Additionally, nothing will lose you a customer faster than taking too long to demonstrate value. If they don’t see the value straight away – if they can’t at least visualize the return on their investment with you – then they will question every step along the way, and you’ll be less likely to successfully onboard and keep them.

That’s why it’s important to identify the processes holding up your onboarding, like data ingest, and introduce the right technology to streamline those processes. With CloverDX, you can automate 90% of data ingest processes. This allows your team to deliver value to your customers faster, which in turn decreases churn risk and strengthens your business model.

If your clients can’t trust their data, they won’t trust you

When onboarding a new client, it’s imperative that you’re able to demonstrate reliability and trustworthiness during the process – and nothing undermines that faster than data errors and downtime.

Helpfully, CloverDX helps to minimize downtime, onboard data more efficiently, and create error-free output. Being able to deliver this quickly will allow you to not only avoid a negative experience but create equity and build trust earlier in the customer relationship.

A 10-year-old approach won’t solve the problems of the modern world

Script-based approaches are a part of the norm for many companies, but for most enterprise-level organizations, they just don’t cut it anymore. Not only are they hard to maintain, but they’re not particularly scalable, and this makes them unviable for most fast-growing companies.

HR platform HR Insights were facing a lot of manual work to update customer data, including having to work over the weekend in order to have data ready for customers Monday morning. When customers wanted to update their data more frequently, the company realized their manual, ad-hoc approach wasn't going to be able to scale.

Andrew Peralta, Director of Platform and Development, explains “We wanted to remove the human intervention and the potential for human error. Manually importing data into a database isn’t a scalable process – we wanted to build something that was consistent and that we could leverage from one client to another.”

With CloverDX now handling the automated data workflows, that previous manual work is now removed. Anywhere between 45 and 60 minutes of manual effort, per client, per day, is now down to zero manual work required, as the jobs are just scheduled and run automatically.

Read the full case study here: Saving hours of manual work with automated data onboarding

Your newest USP? Your reliable, efficient, and even pleasant data onboarding experience

Data ingest struggles are so common amongst fast-growing SaaS businesses that minimizing them actually becomes a significant selling point for your business.

If you can shorten time to value and improve reliability of your data processes, it will create a customer experience that your competitors aren’t yet able to deliver. 

Imagine being able to say to your customers, “Oh yeah, your data? Doesn’t matter what format it’s in, or what state. We’ll take whatever you’ve got, and we’ll take it from there. Nothing to do on your end, and at a lower cost, too.” Honestly, you’d close deals just with that sentence alone.

And the technology that will get you there? CloverDX.

At CloverDX, we help companies solve real-world data challenges. For our SaaS clients, that means more efficient and reliable data onboarding, without tying up developers in the day-to-day processes.

Just imagine being able to receive data and then quickly and accurately ingest it into whatever format you need without input from your technical team – how huge of an impact would that have on your business?

Learn more about how CloverDX helps enterprise organizations ingest customer data quickly and accurately.