Customer onboarding is usually a process with many steps and requirements: Proposal creations, contract and SLA approvals, billing and ERP profiles, assigning accounts to different team members, and the list goes on.
Without an automated onboarding process, this back and forth of information can become days, weeks, and even months. A time-consuming process like this may have a negative impact on your customers and hurt your business efficiency.
Most customer onboarding processes can be simplified by unlocking the potential of Power Automate to connect with both office 365 and external applications such as Salesforce, DocuSign, and Adobe to build a streamlined process that requires little to no monitoring from your staff. In this blog, we will talk about how we have helped some our clients to implement onboarding automation with Power Automate
Table of Contents
What is customer onboarding automation?
Customer onboarding usually involves entering the same data in many systems and platforms: creating profiles, generating contracts or agreements, uploading documents, and much more. When you automate a customer onboarding process, different systems and applications can be synched and configured to talk to each other and automatically perform action in the different platforms involved.
With Power Platform, and specifically with Power Automate, an automation can be created to have different apps send data between them and perform actions based on the outputs of previous steps: For example:
- A new client signs a contract through DocuSign
- Hubspot deal status is automatically updated
- Generate a KYC document (Know your customer)
- Notification to Legal an Accounting team is automatically sent
- Client profile is created in your accounting system
- Tax forms are pre-filled and sent for review
- A welcome email is sent to new customer
Why automation is essential for customer onboarding success
Customers are key to any business, a faster onboarding process means quicker product adoption and higher customer satisfaction. The back and forth of the many onboarding steps can require hours, days or even weeks to complete if there are many users and apps involved, and this can become an important bottleneck in any company, if someone is out of the office or they are not immediately available, a new customer might need to wait for even longer to start performing transactions.
Having a standardized onboarding process using Power Automate as an orchestrator, reduces human errors, allows for data tracking and removes manual or repetitive tasks.
Benefits of automating customer onboarding process
Faster onboarding processes
When Power Automate is used to manage the steps of an onboarding process, all involved apps will talk to each other right after the task is complete, without having to wait for staff input or confirmation (unless any approval step is incorporated in the workflow). This will reduce the time required to onboard new customers.
Reduced errors and improved consistency
Since all tasks and actions will be configured to be executed from Power Automate, all data entered in the systems will be standard, consistent and accurate. Human errors will also be reduced and mistakes related to data entry will decrease to almost none – wave goodbye to having your same customer name written differently in all your systems!
Enhanced customer experience
Power Automate can be used to fill out automatic templates, generate contracts, create profiles in different systems and send automatic notifications and reminders – automating your onboarding process can lead to reduced paperwork with better communication with customers and hence, a better experience for them.
Scalable solutions for growing businesses
Imagine having onboarded a new customer in 15-30 minutes instead of days or weeks, or having a standard process that allows you intake and onboard a higher volume of customers – all of this is possible by connecting your different platforms with Power Automate.
Tools for customer onboarding automation
There are many options to use when automating the onboarding process with Power Automate:
- Word Templates – generate contracts, SLAs, predefined
- Teams or Outlook Notifications
- Out-of-the-box approvals
- Document repository in SharePoint
Depending on the steps required to onboard customers, Power Automate can use one or multiple of the tools mentioned above, and it can act as an orchestrator to have these steps connected with many other apps or platforms you may be working with – Hubspot, DocuSign or Salesforce.
When trying to interact to all the different apps and platforms involved in the onboarding process there are different alternatives with Power Automate:
- Power Automate connectors – these are very powerful and pretty much take care of performing all data transmission among systems without much effort – other than configuring the connector. Power Platform has hundred of connectors and many keep being added every month: you can connect to Gmail, Mailchamp, Hubspot, SharePoint, Planner, Teams, and the list could go on all day!
- Custom connectors – even if Power Platform has hundred of connectors, Power Automate can’t cover all existing applications in the market so not all platforms are available through connectors, but if the apps you’re working with has a web service in the form of an API, then a custom connector can be created to have Power Automate interact with these third party apps.
- API Calls – related to custom connectors, when apps have an API available, you can also connect directly through Power Automate without using a custom connector!
Why Choose Power Automate for automated onboarding?
There are many benefits of using Power Automate as your automation tool for customer onboarding:
- There is a wide range of apps available to connect very easily to (Data connectors).
- If the apps or platforms you’re working with don’t have a data connector, you can create your own, so there is no limitation on the apps you can use, as long as they have a web service to connect to.
- Full integration with all the Microsoft 365 suite – Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Planner, you name it! Any tool that lives in the Microsoft 365 environment can be easily implemented and included in the workflow.
- Templates, Document management and E-signature – with Power Automate, any document that you’re currently using for customer onboarding such as SLAs or contracts, can be automatically generated based on a predefined template and sent for approval and signature to all applicable parties.
- End-to-end process automation – with Power Automate you can automate small parts of your process, but one of the main selling points of Power Automate is its ability to orchestrate from start to end simple or complex processes that involve many steps and many
Step-by-Step guide: Automating customer onboarding with power automate
Step 1: Map your customer onboarding workflow
First things first, before jumping into Power Automate it’s really important to analyze and diagnose the current onboarding process. We usually start by asking some questions:
- How do we know when there is a new customer that needs to be onboarded? A contract is signed? Do we get an email?
- Which tools or platforms are currently being used? Hubspot, Mailchamp, Salesforce? Which actions are performed on each platform?
- Who are the users or teams that are involved in the process? Who is a “notification” user? Who are the users that need to make a decision or an approval? Who needs to perform actions?
- What’s the order in which steps should happen?
- Are there documents that result from the process? Do they need to be signed?
- Are there notifications or messages sent to internal or external parties?
Two process diagramming tools that we usually work with for customer onboarding are swimlanes and SIPOC (Supplier, Input, Process, Output and Customer).
Swimlanes will help us identify which tools are being used and which actions are performed in each platform.
SIPOC is amazing for identifying the parties involved in the process, who provides information and who receives it.
Step 2: Define automation triggers in power automate
The first thing we need in Power Automate is the trigger – meaning the action or event that will start the onboarding process. There are many types of triggers and what we will use depends on the process itself. Some examples of triggers are:
- When a new email arrives to a mailbox
- When a contract is signed in a third party app such as DocuSign or AdobeSign
- When a deal changes status in Hubspot
- When a user fills out a form with new client data
Step 3: Define notifications and approvals
From the SIPOC analysis, we can define who are the parties involved in the process and based on this list, we need to identify the following type of users:
- Users who will receive notifications of the process
- Users who need to make a decision
- Users who will need to review client information and approve or reject
- Users who need to complete a task
With Power Automate, there are many ways to send notifications: Teams messages, Outlook emails or Planner tasks.
Step 4: Integrate with CRM and all your other tools
This is when we get to customize the workflow as much as we’d like – depending on the tools involved in the process, Power Automate can connect to many platforms either using Data connectors or custom connectors.
It can also generate contracts or agreements and store them in the file repository of your choice.
Real-world example of automated onboarding
Using our Power Platform consulting services, we partnered with a client in the IT industry that works with clients from the United States to create Power Automate workflow that connects to all the tools they currently use and create the client profile in each of the platforms. Before automating with Power Automate, this was a very manual process that required entering the same customer data in multiple systems. The automated and improved process looks like this:
- Customer signs the work contract in DocuSign
- Contract information is automatically extracted from DocuSign
- Hubspot deal status is updated
- Internal approval request is sent
- Create customer profile in 3 different platforms
- Create customer contacts in 2 different platforms
- Upload a copy of the contract to SharePoint
- Create an onboarding task in Planner so the sales user can perform some internal tasks
- A PDF document is generated with some customer data
- Send welcome email to customer with a summary PDF attached
Power Automate acts as an orchestrator of the whole process and connects all the different applications.
Ready to automate your customer onboarding process?
Whether you currently have a standard process in place or if you’re still figuring it out – Power Automate can be of great help and will allow you to avoid manual tasks and save you time. Contact us if you’d like to know how we can help you implement your own customer onboarding process!
