Last updated on June 23rd, 2023 at 12:05 pm
INTRODUCTION
Streamlined client onboarding is the most important component of delivering a positive customer experience and enabling teams to sell more deals and scale revenue. A good onboarding customer experience increases customer lifetime value by turning them in to raving fans. Happy customers become your top referral sources. Similarly, the investor onboarding stage of a fund raising is a significant challenge for both the investors and investor relations team. Till recently it has been a notoriously inefficient and error-prone set of processes that slows down the fund raising and impedes a manager’s ability to bring capital in to the fund.
Today an investor has to fill in 50 to 70 pages of forms by understanding complex legal jargon, if he wishes to invest. This often leads to missed fields and errors in form filling. In the review process, most funds find that only 20% forms are correctly and completely filled.
Investor onboarding is an opportunity for your firm to start on the right note and gain the confidence of the customer for a long-term investment relationship. Experience has shown that these three critical steps ensure that clients are enrolled onboard quickly and without error.
Digitization
Technology is readily available to streamline the investor onboarding process and transition from wet ink signatures to electronic document processing. When forms are submitted electronically there are less chances of missing out on regulatory, mandatory requirements and other details. It also speeds up the review process and reduces the number of avoidable interactions with the clients.
Automation
Automation gives IR teams more operational control over the subscription process than the manual process. Besides it gives visibility to legal teams, compliance teams and fund administrative teams to obtain audit trails of all contact points with the investor.
Leverage purpose-built technology platform:
If managers want to remain competitive in both the short term and the long run, they must continue to find new ways to streamline fundraising using technology to enhance their IR activities. For this, specialized IR purpose-built technology platform should be developed as generalized client onboarding tools do not offer certain capabilities, such as data storage and the ability to pre-populate investor data. Additionally, they do not offer pipeline visibility or reporting capabilities.
Besides the above, following best practices with customers will help you create a solid onboarding experience:
Understand your customer
Knowing your customer better will help you deal with the customers challenges and offer solutions.
Set clear expectations
Never mislead your investor, always let him know beforehand what to expect, so that there are no misunderstandings or misgivings at a later stage. This way they are better prepared for any setbacks or sticky points that may arise.
Maintain Transparency and Stay in constant communication:
Maintaining transparency and regular communication throughout the onboarding process and even after that improves your image and reinforces the confidence of your investor in you. These critical steps by your IR teams can help streamline investor onboarding process and make it memorable.
The Confiex team specializes in providing premium virtual data room solutions tailored for businesses. With their vast experience in working with document sharing platforms, they have been actively supporting the Virtual Data Room community since 2015 by offering valuable information to users free of charge.