How well do you manage that moment of truth when your sales team hands off a new client to customer success or onboarding teams? If your company is still muddling through client onboarding, struggling with manual processes, or consistently running into frustrations and roadblocks that slow down the process, you may be harming your client relationships in the long run. That makes it harder to keep clients from leaving once their current contract is up.

One of the biggest complaints from companies during onboarding is the time it takes from start to go-live—being able to deliver a quicker time-to-value and completing your onboarding on time according to the schedule you provide at the beginning can significantly improve your clients’ views of the entire onboarding process. Here are five ways you can expedite your onboarding process.

1: Standardize the Process

Few things can slow down your onboarding as quickly as the chaos of not having a process. This is especially important as you scale up or grow your company—you want people to have the same quality experience with every onboarding team without missing a step or having things fall through the cracks. Failing to create a standard process leaves so many variables that could easily derail onboarding at every stage.

2: Create Templates for Teams to Follow

Once you have your process in place, create an easy template that everyone can follow. When you have the right software (like GuideCX) you can use templates as a starting point, then tweak it to get a customized experience for each new onboarding. No two clients are exactly alike, so you don’t want it to feel like a cookie-cutter experience, but you also need to have a structure for your team to ensure quality and consistency.

3: Use Digital Tools Whenever Possible

If your current process requires a lot of paperwork or manual entry (for example, in the financial industry where you need copies of identification, paper applications, loan documents, etc.) that can slow down the process. While not everything can be digitized, there are a lot of tools available now that allow for secure transfer of information and the ability to verify documents, so explore digital tools that give you more flexibility and streamline your processes for collecting information.

4: Automate Reporting

Clients want to know what’s going on with their onboarding process. If you don’t have tools that help you automate that reporting, someone on your team is going to spend a lot of time compiling reports and sending this to the appropriate people. In the absence of manual reports, someone will be fielding a lot of calls or emails asking for progress updates. Instead, find a software solution that automates reporting to all the key stakeholders within the process so everyone knows exactly where you stand and when it will be done.

If your current client onboarding software can’t do all these things, contact GuideCX today to learn more about how we are helping companies improve the process with simple and effective onboarding project management tools.