As most businesses know, the first experience that a client has with your product or service means everything. This process, also known as onboarding, is critical to not only making clients feel welcome, but establishing trust — the foundation of a lasting relationship. When First Business realized their current onboarding process was not ideal, they sought a solution that was.

Background

First Business—founded in 1990 in Madison, Wisconsin—is one of the first banks in the Midwest to solely focus on the needs of business owners. As the company grew and expanded their financial service offerings, they found success in not only their niche banking model but their commitment to excellent client service.

A key component of this client service? Their onboarding process.

Problem

When a new client comes aboard First Business, they are given an official onboarding packet. This contains documents related to their new accounts, providing them with relevant information to make them not only feel welcomed but valued as a new client.

First Business realized their onboarding processes were not only complex but slowed down by inefficient workflows and heavy paperwork. They needed a solution that was automated, scalable, and—most of all—efficient.

With a desire to automate onboarding processes, Salesforce seemed like the right solution to pursue. However, it was not clear if or how document generation would work within the platform.

Could implementing Salesforce allow First Business to not only maintain a complex system of legal onboarding documents, but deliver the right documents to the right clients at the right time? Likewise, could they manage and create said documents within the same application?

But more importantly, could Salesforce provide a solution that would work across multiple departments in the organization? Could it transform system processes to improve overall efficiency?

After researching available tools, exploring apps on the Salesforce AppExchange, and even considering the custom route, First Business needed some expert assistance. They set out to find a company who knew a thing or two about implementing Salesforce.

Discovery

“Galvin understood what First Business was trying to accomplish,” said Ryan Frank, IT Business Analyst at First Business. “We just clicked right away.”

Galvin’s team of Salesforce implementation specialists worked closely with First Business to evaluate their business needs and understand their current system processes. They captured workflows to understand how the onboarding process functioned within the system as a whole. This was crucial to identifying inefficiencies, redundancies, and opportunities for improvement.

“Galvin challenged us to do things better,” said Ryan Frank.

Implementation

By deeply understanding the system processes of First Business, Galvin could clearly see not only the limitations but the possibilities. It was obvious that a switch from Salesforce Classic and Salesforce Lightning was necessary in order to streamline onboarding and document generation processes.

Automating onboarding processes

Galvin implemented specific workflows to help First Business reduce complexity and increase efficiency in their overall onboarding process. Within Salesforce, users and teams were established to create a routing system of key onboarding tasks. This enabled onboarding specialists at First Business to quickly identify the status of any client within the onboarding process. By creating this visibility into a client’s status, teams were now empowered to make better decisions, faster.

Setting up document generation

The onboarding process required the management of almost 40 different legal documents that needed to be delivered to clients based on their status and other data parameters.

Galvin automated this process by establishing dynamic data and content rules in Salesforce. Documents could now be automatically sent to clients based on their status within not only the onboarding process but the overall client service workflow.

Likewise, a document generation tool was integrated with the existing DocuSign service to enable First Business to create consistent and up-to-date documents without ever needing to leave Salesforce.

Results

Improving efficiency

With Galvin’s help and expertise, the onboarding process is now 33% faster — manual errors have been reduced and it’s a better experience for First Business clients.

Galvin worked with First Business to not only establish more efficient onboarding workflows, but automate key processes to allow teams to focus on the right tasks and get work done faster.

Building scalability

Because Galvin understood how Salesforce could live within the context of the larger organization, they were able implement a solution that could easily scale to multiple departments across First Business.

“Other departments are salivating to get this into their departments!” said Ryan Frank.

Minimizing future problems

Selecting the wrong software is costly and can hurt productivity. By deeply understanding the business needs of First Business, Galvin was able to find a document generation tool that not only worked well within the Salesforce platform, but saved everyone from a lot of future headaches.

“Galvin’s ability to do vendor software selection for document generation was huge,” said Ryan Frank. “It saved us from a tremendous amount of problems we couldn’t see on the horizon.”

Maximizing future success

“First Business has been a great partner in creating a vision not just for what is immediately in front of the organization, but also what is possible long-term with the right foundation,” said Gary Galvin, CEO of Galvin.

First Business’ vision for the long-term and Galvin’s insight into process improvement built a foundation meant for success. By identifying what wasn’t working and discovering ways to make it better, both teams worked together to implement a solution that improved not only organizational efficiency but the overall client onboarding experience.

“Galvin was instrumental in getting us where we are,” said Ryan Frank.