If Onboarding Partners and Customers is Painful…

When you get a new iPhone or Android, the last thing you want is to wait a long time to get it up and running. How do you think your new customers feel when it takes days, or even weeks to get them up and running with your business?

Suffice to say, that is not the way you want to start off a new business relationship. Slow trading partner and customer onboarding is a headache for everyone involved.

For 73 percent of B2B companies, onboarding remains remarkably slow, needing one week to a month or more to onboard a new trading partner.

73 percent!

That is alarmingly high, yet it is actually something that can be avoided altogether, that is if you are willing to invest in a modern integration technology platform.

The fact is, if you are too slow to onboard trading partners or customers, it sets off a chain reaction which can have a ripple effect throughout your ecosystem. If you are experiencing some of the following symptoms, your B2B integration is more than likely broken:

1. Slow onboarding

It bears repeating – when you onboard a trading partner or customer, that is the very first interaction you are having at the onset of your relationship. If it takes too long, now the relationship is off on the wrong foot.

2. Lack of communication and delays from third-party providers

If you aren’t using modern technology, odds are your communication with any third-party providers you use isn’t exactly up to par.

3. Unable to support different formats and protocols

It’s 2021 – companies across different industries have a varying expectations they need you to meet, and if you can’t support these different formats and protocols, they are going to take their business elsewhere.

4. Forced to say ‘No’ to new business

Here’s the worst one of all. Imagine having to say ‘No’ to a new potential customer because you are unable to support their business?

Thankfully, none of the above symptoms are fatal, and you can recover from one, some, or all of them. Here’s how…

The Cure for Slow Onboarding

Modern integration technology can resolve all of these issues. By utilizing a centralized integration platform, soon you will have:

Any-to-any integration

Flexible protocol connectivity

Self-service integration

Increased agility

More control

Just because your enterprise is currently experiencing sluggish onboarding timeframes doesn’t mean you and your stakeholders stand to be left in the dark permanently.

If your current integration strategy does not support end-to-end integration visibility, you ought to embrace a modern integration platform that can do all these things and more, including transforming EDI documents and putting them into your back-end ERP/WMS/TMS/CRM system to complete its lifecycle B2B transaction. Plus, the capability to do EDI, API, MFT and eCommerce transactions using just one platform will help you leverage integration for the benefit of not just your company, but your entire business ecosystem.

There are other smart moves you can make to fix B2B integration at your company, and we’ll be writing about them in future blogs. But if you want the full story now, download our booklet, ‘Your B2B Integration Strategy is Broken – Here’s What to Do About It’