Service Category: Experience

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Customer onboarding

Customer onboarding is the process of introducing new customers to your business, products, and services. It’s an important step in building lasting relationships with your customers and ensuring that they are set up for success.

Why is customer onboarding important?

Customer onboarding is important for several reasons:

  • It sets the tone for the customer’s experience with your business. A smooth, seamless onboarding process can help build trust and confidence, while a confusing or frustrating process can drive customers away.
  • It helps customers understand your products and services. By providing clear, concise information about your offerings, you can help customers understand how they can benefit from your products and services.
  • It helps you gather valuable customer data. The customer onboarding process is an opportunity to gather important information about your customers, such as their needs and preferences. This can help you tailor your marketing and sales efforts to better meet their needs.

How does data analytics help with customer onboarding?

We help our clients use data analytics to craft the best possible onboarding experience. Some of the ways we help include:

  • Analysing data on your current onboarding process: By analysing data on your current onboarding process, an analytics firm can help you identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and areas for improvement.
  • Identifying key metrics to track: An analytics firm can help you identify key metrics to track during the onboarding process, such as customer satisfaction, retention rates, and conversion rates.
  • Developing a plan: Based on the data they gather, an analytics firm can help you develop a plan for optimising your onboarding process. This might involve streamlining your processes, introducing new technology, or training your team.

Key data metrics for customer onboarding experiences.

Here are a few key metrics that are useful for tracking during the customer onboarding process:

  • Customer satisfaction: Customer satisfaction is a key metric to track during onboarding, as it can help you gauge the effectiveness of your process and identify areas for improvement.
  • Retention rates: Retention rates can help you understand how well you are retaining customers after the onboarding process. A high retention rate can indicate that your onboarding process is successful, while a low retention rate can indicate that there are issues that need to be addressed.
  • Conversion rates: Conversion rates can help you understand how well you are converting leads into customers during the onboarding process. A high conversion rate can indicate that your onboarding process is effective, while a low conversion rate can indicate that there are issues that need to be addressed.

Practical examples

Here are a few examples of how an analytics firm might help optimise the customer onboarding process for different businesses:

  • E-commerce: For an e-commerce business, we help optimise the onboarding process by analysing data on customer behaviour and identifying opportunities to improve the checkout process.
  • SaaS: For a SaaS business, we might help optimise the onboarding process by analysing data on customer usage patterns and identifying opportunities to improve the onboarding experience.
  • Healthcare: For a healthcare business, we might help optimise the onboarding process by analysing data on patient needs and preferences and identifying opportunities to improve the patient experience.

So why not put your best foot forward?

We’ll help you onboard and retain your customers.

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Marketing automation

Modern marketing automation tools are more powerful than ever and help you deliver the right message to the right person and the right time – ultimately delivering the best outcome for both your organisation and your customers.

Capabilities of modern marketing automation platforms.

In fact, we think the term marketing automation undersells what these platforms can do. We prefer the much more well-rounded term “customer engagement platform”.

These customer engagement platforms have a broad range of capabilities, including:

  • Lead generation: Customer engagement platforms can help businesses generate leads through targeted email campaigns, social media marketing, and lead generation forms.
  • Lead nurturing: Customer engagement platforms can help businesses nurture leads through targeted email campaigns, lead scoring, and lead segmentation.
  • Customer segmentation: Customer engagement platforms can help businesses segment their customers based on their needs and preferences, allowing them to deliver targeted marketing messages.
  • Personalization: Customer engagement platforms can help businesses deliver personalized marketing messages based on customer data, increasing the effectiveness of their campaigns.
  • Analytics: Customer engagement platforms provide analytics capabilities that allow businesses to track and analyse the performance of their marketing campaigns, identify areas for improvement, and optimize their efforts.
  • Cross-channel marketing: Customer engagement platforms provide cross-channel marketing capabilities, allowing businesses to deliver targeted marketing messages through email, push notifications, in-app messaging, and other channels.
  • A/B testing: Customer engagement platforms provide A/B testing capabilities, allowing businesses to test different marketing campaigns and messages to see which ones are most effective.
  • Campaign automation: Customer engagement platforms allow businesses to automate their marketing campaigns, triggering messages based on specific events or customer actions.

Integration with analytics and analytics platforms.

Modern customer engagement platforms tightly integrate with modern analytics platforms like Amplitude and Mixpanel. They also receive data from customer data platforms like Segment, simplifying the setup process and enabling you to focus on delivering outcomes, rather than costly integration developments.

By integrating these tools, you’ll not only have a greater understanding of the impact of your marketing, but you’ll also be able to optimise and target your customers in a much more granular manner – delivering the right message to the right customer.

Why invest in marketing automation?

There are several reasons why organisations invest in marketing automation:

  • Improved efficiency: Marketing automation can help you streamline your marketing efforts, allowing you to get more done in less time.
  • Increased ROI: By automating tasks such as lead generation and lead nurturing, marketing automation can help you improve ROI.
  • Improved customer experience: Marketing automation can help you deliver personalized, targeted marketing messages, improving the customer experience

So why not take a load off your shoulders?

We’ll help you message your customers in the most effective manner, guaranteed.

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Software solutions

We believe that software development is a crucial component of our services. That’s why we have an in-house software development team that can help our clients build custom solutions that meet their specific needs.

Why do we develop software?

Sometimes we’re asked why we develop software if we’re “just” an analytics firm. Well, we understand that data is only as useful as the tools that are used to collect it, analyse it and use it. That’s why we believe it’s important to be able to develop custom software solutions that can help our clients make the most of their data.

Advantages of our in-house development capability for you.

Having an in-house development capability has several advantages for you:

  • Custom solutions: By developing software in-house, we can build custom solutions that are tailored to your specific needs. This means that you don’t have to compromise on functionality or fit.
  • Quick turnaround: With an in-house development team, we can get started on projects quickly, delivering solutions faster than if we had to rely on an external development team.
  • Better communication: By working with an in-house development team, you can expect better communication and a more seamless process. This can help ensure that projects are delivered on time and to the desired specifications.

Practical examples.

Here are a few examples of the types of software that we have developed in-house for our clients:

Off-the-shelf solutions.

Our in-house capability also helps us recognise when and where ROI exists for our clients to build a custom solution, or compromise and settle with a commercial off-the-shelf solution.

We help our clients in an end-to-end manner, collecting requirements, evaluating existing solutions, and rolling out and supporting the solution long-term. We’re your long-term partner in all things software and analytics.

So you want a custom solution developed?

We’ll help you find or build the best-fit solution for your organisation.

Driving fundraising growth using analytics

Endeavour Foundation is an independent, for purpose organisation established in 1951 with a vision to support people with an intellectual disability to live their best life. Endeavour Foundation Lotteries fundraising contributes to programs and services that deliver on making possibilities a reality for people with a disability.

Vaxa Analytics was engaged to analyse the performance of their complex lottery product, with an aim to discover and unlock growth opportunities using data-driven decision making. Endeavour Foundation Lotteries chose Vaxa Analytics to undertake this scope of work based on the proven track record in the foundation’s commercial industry arm, Endeavour Foundation Industries.

The outcome

The Vaxa Analytics team delivered critical pieces of data management infrastructure – including the introduction of state-of-the-art marketing automation and behavioural analytics platforms and providing project services on the replacement of the core lottery software system – towards an automatic and unified view of customers and the product. The team designed and operationalised new data sets via self-service reporting and enabled more advanced capabilities like machine learning and multivariate analysis. These capabilities delivered accurate answers on complex questions like customer churn, segmentation, purchase propensity and revenue forecasts. By understanding Endeavour Foundation Lotteries’ long term product strategy and building and delivering an aligned data strategy, Vaxa Analytics unlocked millions in annual revenue improvements and laid the foundations for improved customer experience and product growth moving forward.

Consolidating datasets to stem the app addiction

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It’s fair to say that most businesses are onboarding more software and apps than they’re offloading. Okta’s 2021 Business at Work report clocks the average business as using 88 apps! That’s a lot of apps – and a lot of data sources. 

In this blog, we’re going to take a look at the obvious and not-so-obvious benefits of consolidating datasets from your business apps. We’ll cover how it makes information more visible for your decision making, how it brings consistency and control to your processes, how it improves your compliance and security, and (usually the first question asked) how it’ll provide a return on investment for your business. 

Information visibility 

We won’t spend too much time discussing the benefit of information visibility, because it’s probably the most obvious and certainly the most spruiked benefit of consolidating your dataset. We’d like to spend more of your time discussing the other benefits that don’t get as much of the limelight. 

But nonetheless, it is a big benefit, because better decisions are always made when more data is available. Would you have eaten at that dodgy restaurant if you had access to the health inspectors’ data? Probably not! 

The same can be said for your business; if you’re only looking at one system, you’re not getting the full picture. And remember the saying: “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. 

Consistency and control 

The best standard operating procedures in the world still can’t prevent the human error that arises when the procedure is repeated regularly. It’s why your insurance company passed you over to the wrong department (and set you back in the queue!), or you realise you forgot to put milk in your coffee. 

If a human oversees manually collating a dataset each week for your weekly reports, it’s almost guaranteed that an error will work its way in eventually. Humans are fallible. 

Computers, on the other hand, are surgical. They’ll do the same thing you ask them to do, day in, day out, and exactly the same way every single time. That’s why an upfront investment in automating your data consolidation is so worthwhile – do it right once, and it’s done forever (maintenance notwithstanding, of course). 

In practical terms, this means you can be confident in the metrics you’re reporting to the board because you know the dataset was assembled correctly. On a broader scale, it also means everyone in your organisation is reporting off the same dataset, so you avoid the confusing scenario where your metrics conflict with another analysis because each had slightly different methodologies behind them. 

Productivity & return on investment 

It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of your weekly reporting taking up far too many working hours – Excel spreadsheets, .csv files, weird custom data formats (and hopefully not paper forms!) all need to be collated, combined, and analysed manually each time you need an answer. 

If that sounds like your situation, have you taken the time to consider the true cost to your business? For the sake of argument, let’s say the person preparing the pack each week is on $100k and is spending about a day collating the pack – each report pack costs almost $500! 

Now, sure, the report is usually important enough that they can’t be cut. But because these packs are usually pulling the same data sets together each time, they’re prime candidates for automation. Let’s let the computers do what they’re good at: repetitive tasks with surgical precision. 

The beauty of such an automated process is that you release a full day of resources to work on something much more valuable – be it more in-depth analysis on specific business opportunities, focusing on new views of data for better insight, or in the case of many smaller business, just doing their core job (which probably has better ROI than collating .csvs and Excel spreadsheets!) 

Compliance and security 

With ever-growing public awareness of privacy and associated data security, more and more people exercise their “right to be forgotten“. While not a legislative requirement everywhere yet, recognising and acting on these requests should be seen as an important aspect of being a good community citizen. But do you know every location where your customer’s data is stored? And would you be confident in asserting that you have expunged all this information? Even worse – how many uncontrolled datasets are floating around in company laptops and network drives because they were used as part of an analysis pack? What are you doing to protect your customer’s data (and your business interests) from such a serious data breach risk? 

Consolidation of your datasets into a single location vastly simplifies all these problems. You’ll no longer need to provide people access to each system’s backend individually, nor will they need to export the data. Instead, you’ll have a unified, consistent dataset sitting centrally (usually on the cloud) where you can hook up your business intelligence tools directly. 

This also simplifies your approach to security – does your analyst actually need to know your customer’s street address, or will just seeing postcode suffice? You can create custom column and row slices of this centralised dataset and provide only the relevant slice to the relevant stakeholder in your business. No more “all or nothing” here! 

Hopefully we’ve been able to open your eyes up to some of the finer details around the benefits of consolidating your datasets. While seeing more of the big picture is certainly a massive benefit, the others in compliance, security, and productivity should each be a consideration in your investment. 

If this sounds like an initiative you’d like to undertake, we’d be happy to design your data strategy, guide you through the execution, and help you realise all of these benefits and more. 

Contact us here.