The fastest way to onboard data

Data onboarding has a tendency to be a slow, painful, painstaking process, but it doesn’t have to be that way! There’s a fast, safe and powerful way to improve your data onboarding process.

Right now, you’re probably dealing with boilerplate processes that don't fit, you have little to no flexibility to respond to unique challenges and customer needs, and you have to be on top of the excessive back-and-forth of onboarding-related emails. And then there are the complicated (frequently manual) data cleaning requirements.

Just thinking about it is exhausting.

Here’s what you can do to streamline and accelerate your data onboarding process:

How to speed up data onboarding

Luckily, there’s a fast, safe and efficient way to collect and onboard data. Instead of getting stuck trying to make a boilerplate template or process work for each unique customer, file type and use case, implementing a robust data onboarding solution will not only lower your operational costs, but also accelerate time to value, increase revenue opportunities and help you make better decisions faster.

A data onboarding platform will help you convert and onboard your customers' data effortlessly. It can help you eliminate costly, services-heavy processes and can enable seamless collaboration between customers and teams. Ultimately, you’ll be able to reduce resource costs, accelerate revenue and enhance data quality and compliance.

How do you choose a data onboarding solution?

You’re looking for a solution that will support your specific requirements and use case and one that can easily fit into your tech stack and development tooling. Choosing the best solution for your needs is critical because it directly impacts the outcome and success of your operations.  By using the ideal solution for your use case, you can avoid the high costs of missed opportunities, delayed revenue and the time and resources involved in creating and maintaining complex workarounds.

But how do you know which solution is ideal for your specific needs and requirements? We created a clear and comprehensive checklist that will guide you through the decision-making process. The checklist walks you through:

• Critical data onboarding capabilities

• Key factors to keep in mind

• How to select the solution that makes sense for you

Download your free copy of the checklist for accelerated data onboarding.

Want to learn how you can accelerate your data workflow? Schedule a free demo now for a personalized look into how Flatfile can solve your data challenges.

Adding superpowers to data onboarding with AI

Don’t ignore the power AI has to accelerate the onboarding process! AI is changing how companies import, manage and leverage data, giving technical and non-technical users new capabilities. Using AI in the onboarding process opens up levels of automation, data quality and speed that used to be almost impossible to reach.

Integrating AI-enhanced features into data onboarding processes offers enormous benefits in terms of speed, efficiency and accuracy. These technologies can help you automate file formatting, extract relevant data, optimize bandwidth usage, enhance security measures, facilitate collaboration and provide personalized recommendations.

Unprecedented accuracy and speed

AI can speed up the onboarding process in numerous ways. It can, for example, accelerate data cleaning by automatically identifying and fixing inconsistencies, errors and missing values within datasets. Algorithms learn from patterns in the data and can automate the process of validating information against predefined rules, ensuring data accuracy and reliability.

Another key challenge of importing data is the need to extract information from unstructured sources like documents, websites, PDFs or images. AI can interpret unstructured data from invoices, forms or contracts and automatically convert them into structured formats for easy integration into databases or analytics platforms.

Usually, speed, efficiency and quality are impossible to achieve together simultaneously, but AI has put this in much closer reach. By using AI, users can perform more and more complex data review, validation and transformation actions than ever before, and even less tech-savvy users can manipulate data faster and more efficiently.

Mapping data from multiple sources into a unified format can be complicated and often requires human oversight. However, AI can recognize patterns and relationships within datasets, facilitating a much faster and more precise mapping of source to target formats.

AI's role in the data onboarding process revolutionizes how businesses collect, manage and utilize information. By leveraging AI's capabilities, companies can enhance their decision-making processes, drive innovation and gain a competitive edge in today's data-driven landscape.

The benefits of an accelerated data onboarding process

Quickly and successfully navigating the data onboarding process is critical for ensuring a positive first impression. If customers hate how they're onboarded, it's unlikely that they'll feel satisfied or stick around for long. Besides keeping your teams and customers happy, there are more key business reasons to speed up your onboarding process:

Accelerating time to value

The sooner your solution can solve a problem, the sooner your customers can derive value from it. The sooner you have a strong data onboarding solution in place, the faster you will streamline and accelerate the process of getting data into your systems. Additionally, your customers and users will benefit from having an improved user experience and gaining access to their data much more quickly.

With a data onboarding solution, you can get customer data into your systems faster with an onboarding experience your company needs and your users will love -- without delay or compromises.

Accelerating data availability and timely decision-making

If expert users, managers and decision-makers in your company aren't able to quickly and efficiently access relevant data, your company's ability to derive value from that data will also be delayed or even lost. Inefficient data import processes can cause bottlenecks in data handling, slowing down all processes that depend on timely access to accurate data. A data onboarding solution will ensure that data is collected, cleaned, transformed and validated rapidly and accurately.

Reducing in-house development time and cost

Data, especially data from countless unmanaged sources, will likely be full of errors, come in a variety of formats or have unclear data definitions. A data onboarding solution will help you check, clean and validate data efficiently and thoroughly to minimize data errors and ensure that all stakeholders have reliable data to work with. 

Additionally, the time and effort required to design, develop, test and maintain a data onboarding solution can quickly tie up software development resources and divert your team away from focusing on core strategic initiatives that deliver greater ROI. Typically, implementing a proven data onboarding solution provides more comprehensive functionality much faster and at a fraction of the in-house development cost, enabling your team to start working with the data they need immediately. 

How Flatfile can help

When you really examine your customer onboarding process, you'll probably find that it's difficult to implement the improvements you need on your own, especially at scale. Fortunately, Flatfile is designed to help you build the ideal data onboarding experience for your use case and requirements. It's a collaborative, secure platform that helps companies speed up every aspect of onboarding. 

Flatfile accelerates data onboarding by providing highly customizable automation and advanced data collection, mapping, transformation and validation capabilities. It also offers AI-powered features that will speed up your customer onboarding process, enabling you to deal efficiently with all of the real-world data your customers have.

Want to learn more about how Flatfile can accelerate and streamline your data onboarding processes? Book a demo with a Flatfile expert today.