We’re all fans of Captain Jack at my house. That’s not the dashing leader of the Torchwood spin –off, but Johnny Depp’s cavalier Pirate of the Caribbean. This suggests, rightly, that viewing habits in my house are tailored to the identity characteristics of my two teenage daughters - with Keira Knightley thrown in to keep my interest (as a social study in the role of the feminist in the 18th century of course...)
Depp’s definition of on-boarding would involve a cunning and opportunistic raid on a treasure laden ship - but in our struggling economy on-boarding is taking on a new meaning, becoming an increasingly important aspect of sales growth for the modern consumer facing business.
Businesses all need to launch new products, often through new channels, and all talk the mantra about attracting new customers and increasing share of wallet. The reality today, however, is a business development team launching a new product or service will have IT resource constraints, legacy systems to change, time to market demands, limited budgets and probably a conservative attitude to risk from senior management.
In these conditions, outsourcing of services becomes a serious option for businesses which need to stay agile and want to align costs with the benefits they derive. The traditional outsourcers, however, can be as ponderous around process, system change and timescales as some of the customers they serve.
The delivery of an effective on-boarding service requires more than just IT expertise. It’s about designing micro-sites that attract and retain visitors, it’s about easy customer validation and authentication processes that make customers sign up (and weed out the fraudsters) and it’s about the relevance and quality of the communication process in those first 90 days. Customer experience is king in the on-line World.
GB Group now finds itself in a unique position. We’ve got 20 plus years experience in validating customer sign up processes, we host data, we provide managed marketing services, we integrate ID check s into client business applications. We also have an agile approach to delivery of services which has meant that, for some clients, we’ve been able to deploy solutions in literally years less than internal IT or our competitors.
So customer on-boarding isn’t a market opportunity for pirates, but it’s probably not one for the established outsourcers or ponderous marketing services providers either. Businesses need fast time to market, and customers need intuitive, easy to use web sites to find, navigate and buy from. This is GB Group’s expertise, building on our deep understanding of how to use identity characteristics to improve the sales and marketing capability of our clients. Businesses seeking help to build an end to end customer take-on service will find GB Group a very capable partner...
Nick