Customer Onboarding Research
Pre-filling onboarding forms with public company data found via search.
The problem
B2B onboarding forms ask new customers to re-type information (company size, industry, headquarters) that's already publicly available, and every field a signup flow requires manually is friction that measurably increases drop-off — pre-filling from public data reduces that friction if it can be done accurately.
How the workflow is built
On signup, a query using the provided company name or email domain pulls basic firmographic data — industry, approximate size, headquarters location — from the company's own web presence and business directories, with the pre-filled fields shown to the user for confirmation or correction rather than submitted silently, since accuracy directly affects trust in the onboarding experience.
Example queries
"[company domain]" industry OR sector"[company name]" employee count OR headquarters"[company name]" official website about page
Pitfalls to watch for
- Showing a confidently wrong pre-filled value erodes user trust faster than showing no pre-fill at all, so this workflow needs a real confidence threshold — below which fields are left blank rather than guessed — not an assumption that any search-derived value is good enough to show.
- Company data changes (a headcount range, an industry classification) often lag reality, and a search-derived pre-fill reflects whatever was last indexed, not necessarily the company's current state, so framing it as 'we found this, please confirm' rather than presenting it as fact matters for the UX.
- Free email domains (Gmail, Outlook) and generic company names produce unusable or wildly wrong matches, so the workflow needs a clear fallback (skip pre-fill entirely) for exactly the signups where domain-based lookup can't work reliably.