Lack of Data On-boarding Solutions “Key Pain Point” Across Industries

According to New Survey from Flatfile , Data On-boarding Solutions a “Key Pain Point” Across Industries, Not Many Solutions Exist; Thousands of Participants Highlight the Need for More Streamlined and Efficient Data On-boarding Software

Flatfile, the leading data on-boarding platform, today unveiled results from the first of its kind survey in a new report, “The State of Data On-boarding”. Flatfile has transformed over 300 million rows of data for companies like ClickUp, Blackbaud, Benevity, and Toast.

According to the report, titled “The State of Data On-boarding”, data on-boarding is an increasingly prevalent and persistent pain point for companies.

Why We Need Data On-boarding Solutions

Data On-boarding is the process of migrating customer or other 3rd party data into a new software system,

Flatfile surveyed customer success teams, product managers, engineers and designers closest to the data on-boarding 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 on-boarding data.

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“This survey quantifies what we’ve heard from the market – data on-boarding 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.

David added, “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 on-boarding process and make it an essential part of the overall customer on-boarding strategy.”

Some of the key survey findings include:

Data on-boarding is increasingly routine. 50% of respondents have cited that data on-boarding 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 the respondents reported spending weeks or months to get new data successfully on-boarded, 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 on-boarding their data. Other significant problems include accessing data (28%), security concerns around sensitive data (27%), and data volume (27%).

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Almost every industry has a need for data on-boarding, 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 on-boarding 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 on-boarding problem,” said Boskovic.

“This new data set will inform how we expand upon Flatfile’s on-boarding solution and support clients in industries spanning from healthcare to utilities.”

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While data on-boarding is clearly a critical piece of the overall customer on-boarding process, it has long been neglected and in some cases ignored completely. Customer frustration around the data on-boarding 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 on-boarding experience would look like.

Themes included a demand for custom-built software tools, increased automation throughout the on-boarding process, more integration with other tools, and a general improvement around ease of use when it comes to on-boarding customer data.

Currently, Flatfile removes barriers between humans and data. With AI-assisted data on-boarding, 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.