Taking a Self-Service-Powered Approach to Accelerate Partner Onboarding

Collaboration with channel partners is key to improved relationships and sales. And onboarding plays a vital role in helping companies build successful channel partner relationships.

Onboarding sets the tone for every company aiming to build a successful channel partner relationship. When done properly, it empowers companies to build powerful first impressions. When done poorly, it leaves business customers waiting to receive the promised value, ultimately devaluing and dismantling partner relationships beyond repair.

Organizations that still hobble along manual onboarding processes tend to suffer from multiple pitfalls such as partner disengagement, compromised partner performance, unsatiated business customers, and delays experienced in recruiting the partner.

A self-service-powered onboarding approach to trading partner onboarding can enable businesses to overcome these hurdles and create strong relationships with their partners. It empowers non-technical business users to create onboarding connections in minutes instead of days or months. At the same time, IT is freed from relying on EDI mapping and API and focus on more high-value tasks instead.

When a company takes a self-service integration approach to onboard their partners, they can deliver on their needs faster. That fuels upselling and helps them expand their market reach.

Taking a Legacy Approach to Partner Onboarding Can Prove Detrimental to Your Business

As per research, 40% of companies take four weeks of calendar time to onboard a new trading partner.

Owing to the proliferation of partner data, onboarding has become a mammoth task. Companies that rely on manual intervention techniques and B2B/EDI connections to grow a partner ecosystem. IT integrators need to write long hours of coding to create onboarding connections. However, that takes a lot of time and effort, leading to inefficient, redundant processes. When a change has to be made or updates are required, IT teams must invest weeks or months of execution time, which results in onboarding backlogs, poor visibility into trading partner relationships, and costly errors.

To avoid that, companies need to reimagine their partner onboarding capabilities through self-service.

Transform Partner Onboarding with Self-Service Integration

Companies can leverage the self-service integration approach to transform partner onboarding. In doing so, even non-technical business users can onboard complex, bi-directional partner data in minutes instead of months.

Here are a few functionalities of a self-service integration platform that plays an important role in transforming partner relationships, speeding up partner ramp times, and creating new revenue streams.

Pre-Built Application Connectors: Application connectors for cloud-based applications such as HubSpot, Shopify, Salesforce, Big Commerce, and more enable business users to create data connections and exchange data directly with these applications. These connectors support advanced protocols, including FTP, AS2, JMS, SFTP, and more to support a trading partner.

Shared Templates: This functionality empowers non-technical business users to create data connections with partners without excessively relying on IT. It allows the reuse of partner profiles and automates data migration. It also enables business users to exchange information such as purchase orders, inventory data, and more at speed and scale. Shared templates also help organizations cut down onboarding time by 80 per cent and trade with new partners faster, improving cash flow and growing revenue. Ultimately, it enables companies to go after new markets and customers more aggressively by becoming easier to do business with.

Dashboards: Managing trading partner relationships calls for transparency throughout the onboarding process. Customized dashboards deliver real-time information that empowers everyone in the company to create more revenue-driving business relationships. This functionality empowers businesses to monitor exchanged information with historical logs in real-time. Hence, if an organization wants to evaluate the data, it can do so well without delay.

AI and ML- Powered Data Mapping: AI-enabled data mapping solutions enable business users to map the onboarded partner data - at the speed of business. It leverages machine learning algorithms to create intelligent data mappings. By using AI-enabled solutions to map and integrate partner data, organizations can deliver delightful CXs and grow revenue.

In short, companies that want to become successful “thrivers” in the current digital age can rely on self-service to speed up their onboarding processes by up to 80 percent.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of EconoTimes