Data Onboarding a "Key Pain Point" Across Industries, Not Many Solutions Exist, According to New Survey from Flatfile

DENVER, Dec. 3, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Flatfile, the leading data onboarding platform, today unveiled results from the first of its kind survey in a new report, The State of Data Onboarding. The report reveals that data onboarding, the process of migrating customer or other 3rd party data into a new software system, is an increasingly prevalent and persistent pain point for companies. 

Flatfile surveyed customer success teams, product managers, engineers and designers closest to the data onboarding process seeking common pain-points experienced by these stakeholders, their internal teams, and their customers. One of the most important takeaways from the survey was that while more than 90% of respondents must transfer data from one system to another at some point, more than three-quarters of them either "sometimes or often" run into problems onboarding data.

"This survey quantifies what we've heard from the market – data onboarding is a crucial, but painstaking process that holds back individual companies and entire industries from reaching their full potential," said David Boskovic, Co-Founder and CEO, Flatfile. "The last thing a company wants is to lose a client over frustration due to data migration. This is why it's critical to continually optimize the data onboarding process and make it an essential part of the overall customer onboarding strategy."

Some of the key survey findings include:

• Data onboarding is increasingly routine. 50% of respondents cited data onboarding as a daily activity. 28% said weekly and 22% reported that they have to onboard data multiple times per day.
• Employee talent is often sidelined to troubleshoot. Nearly half of respondents reported spending weeks or months to get new data successfully onboarded, and only 4% of respondents said their data was imported without issue. 
• Problems experienced across a diverse range of industries. While about half of respondents are dealing with CRM data, 26% work with financial data, and 23% with eCommerce data.
• The data challenges are multifaceted. 76% report data formatting issues, and 69% have problems with data validation when onboarding their data. Other significant problems include accessing data (28%), security concerns around sensitive data (27%), and data volume (27%).

Most every industry has a need for data onboarding, including customer and prospect data for sales organizations, shipping information for logistics companies, digital assets for libraries and museums, and financial data for investment evaluations, to name a few. A poor data onboarding experience results in reduced time-to-value for customers and great inefficiencies for Customer Success and Implementation teams.

"The intention of this survey was to identify the scope and prevalence of the data onboarding problem," said Boskovic. "This new data set will inform how we expand upon Flatfile's onboarding solution and support clients in industries spanning from healthcare to utilities." 

While data onboarding is clearly a critical piece of the overall customer onboarding process, it has long been neglected and in some cases ignored completely. Customer frustration around the data onboarding experience has been mounting within businesses of all sizes, and the status quo has been to solve the problem with human effort. Respondents articulated a clear vision of what an ideal onboarding experience would look like. Themes included a demand for custom built software tools, increased automation throughout the onboarding process, more integration with other tools and a general improvement around ease of use when it comes to onboarding customer data.

The full report, containing a detailed description of all findings and a thorough description of the state of the industry, is available here.

About Flatfile
Flatfile's mission is to remove barriers between humans and data. With AI-assisted data onboarding, they eliminate repetitive work and make B2B data transactions fast, intuitive, and error-free. Flatfile automatically learns how imported data should be structured and cleaned, enabling customers and teams to spend more time using their data instead of fixing it. Flatfile has transformed over 300 million rows of data for companies like ClickUp, Blackbaud, Benevity, and Toast. To learn more about Flatfile's products, Portal and Concierge, email [email protected] or get started for free at flatfile.io.

Media Contact:
Sheila Lahar
617-818-7561
[email protected] 

SOURCE Flatfile

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