Overview
This article reviews concepts for getting existing customers onto your website for the first time. This may be transferring customers from an existing website or getting existing or new customers onto your new or existing website for the first time and making sure they are attached to the correct account (ERP Customer).
NOTE: Is always tempting to send your customers a password they can use to access the site the first time or if they have forgotten their password and you want to reset it for them. Sending passwords (even if temporary) to customers is never safe and the recommendation is to always have them set their own password through one of the existing processes mentioned below.
If you allow customers to create new accounts on the website, the customer onboarding process becomes more important as you want your existing customers tied to the accounts that is syncing from the ERP and not creating a new accounts that create new customers in the ERP. Having a plan and proactively communicating to your customers the benefits of connecting to the existing account can be a big step toward meeting this goal.
CIMcloud Features to Assist with Customer Onboarding
Allow Visitors to Create a New User for Existing Account – This process allows users to enter billing zip, account number, and a recent invoice number to automatically match to their account. Once they have matched the account then they can create a username and password. More information can be found in this article – New Account and Contact Creation
Create Contact – You can create new contacts for an account by using the worker portal Add Contact page or you can upload a spreadsheet with multiple contacts if you are creating a large number of new contacts. Following is a sample upload. It may take up to 5 minutes for users imported by spreadsheet to be useable as the system encrypts the passwords.
Reset Password – This process sends the user a link in an email based on their username and email address. The link allows the user to reset their password. The user does not need to know the old password just their username and the email address associated with this contact record. It should be noted that this link has an expiration (defaulted to 2 hours) after which it will not work to reset the password. If you are going to use this process it is recommended that you send the user to the page to initiate the process versus initiating the process for them since the link is only good for a defined short period of time.
Request Username – This process allows users to retrieve their username. This is retrieved based on the email address associated to the username. This process will not send a user the username for the House User created by the system (where username equals the account number). If there are multiple users created with the same email address the system will send just one of the usernames.
Options for Onboarding
These are some of the process that have been successfully used to onboard users.
Send an email to user about the Allow Visitors to Create a New User for Existing Account process. Let them know the information (account number, billing address , and recent invoice number) they will need to create the user attached to their account and where to find it. Let your users know the benefits of the website and the importance of being attached to their existing account. The email can be generated your customer list and/or services you may be using like Constant Contact or Mailchimp. Include a link to direct them directly to the Allow Visitors to Create a New User for Existing Account page to initiate the process.
Another option is to create contacts for your customers and through an email generated through your customer list and/or services you may be using like Constant Contact or Mailchimp direct them to the Reset Your Password page. You can let them know their username in the email. If desired you can use the email address as their username. The password reset email will send to the user based on the username and the email address on the contact. This process can also be used if you have an existing website and want to transfer usernames to the new site. Let your users know the benefits of the website and the importance of being attached to their existing account.
If you are uncomfortable sending your users their username you can set up users like the previous option but instead of sending users to the Reset Your Password you can send them to Forgot Your Username. In this case they will need to retrieve their username and then use the Reset Your Password process.
Security warning: Never send users passwords directly through email.