The process of onboarding is a vital part of the customer experience and the entire customer journey. How many times have you been annoyed by a service before you’ve even signed up for it? Or lost the will to carry on and simply decided that it wasn’t worth the hassle? Onboarding sets the tone for all future customer-business interactions, and a frustrating registration process gets this relationship off to a rocky start. Despite the availability of the latest tools and sales training it is staggering to think that nine in ten businesses still experience some form of abandonment during this process.
The results of a poor onboarding strategy can be catastrophic to a business in this economic climate. Missed business opportunities, the loss of potential customers to competitors and the failure to attract new customers all ultimately affect the bottom line.
In fact, according to our research, 21% of UK business leaders believe that if the abandonment rate was reduced by 50%, they would see a 20% revenue increase, further highlighting the importance of the process.
Here are some simple steps businesses can take to improve their customer onboarding and boost not only brand reputation but also customer retention and new business.
1. Activate the right mix of technology and human interaction
The most common pain point during the onboarding process is the lack of human element – how often have you spent hours inputting data or trying to find out the answer to a simple question only to be thrown from one automated process to another with no opportunity to speak to an actual real-life human? Businesses should not forget that human interaction still plays a key role in the onboarding process. Despite the rapid uptake of new technology since the pandemic, and the digitisation of customer interactions jumping to 55% across Europe in July 2020, good customer experience is still about relationships, whether that’s in person or online.
That’s not to say that automation does not have its place – streamlining and modifying the onboarding process through the use of technology can dramatically improve overall customer experience by up to 36% and increase customer retention by over a third (35%). The key, however, is in activating the right mix of relationship development alongside automation to reduce customer churn.
2. Choose the right tools
The more time-consuming and complex an onboarding process appears the higher risk of dropout. In today’s busy environment customers want speed and efficiency. Reflecting on our own experiences it is unsurprising that so many businesses still experience abandonment. People don’t have time for frustrating manual entry, repetitive processes and long, drawn-out security checks. That is why it is vital to choose the right tools to streamline the process and help customers prove their identity and submit the required documents without any unnecessary hassle.
This is where technology comes into play. Identity proofing and verification technologies, used in conjunction with intelligent document processing technologies, are vital components of onboarding. They help to speed the process up without compromising on security. This in turn improves customer experience and reduces dropout rates. Everyone comes out as a winner.
3. Simplify proving identity
The first obstacle in the onboarding experience is usually identity proofing. Is that really them in the picture? And if so, how can you tell if the ID itself is even genuine? Just taking a selfie doesn’t cut it anymore. Take Instagram for example – it is unsurprising that the platform has recently chosen to go one step further in its age verification process to make it safer for young people. However, rather than just scanning user’s IDs, part of this process needs to involve ensuring that a person’s photo is genuine. Instagram has been adding over 100 million new accounts every 4 to 9 months, but how many are legitimate? Hundreds of thousands of those are generated by bots and it can be hard to tell the difference.
To ensure accurate and efficient identity-proofing businesses need to deploy real-time biometrics matching alongside sophisticated forensic analysis. Providing live video and photo capture with sophisticated facial matching is a powerful way to do this. With live facial matching, modern proof of identity software can determine that it’s an actual ‘real life’ human being and measure specific features for authenticity using advanced AI. Next, it can compare that live video with the scanned official ID photo to give immediate verification that the person is legitimate. This instant proof of identity raises the bar for security and accelerates the onboarding process.
4. Find out what’s working…and what’s not
You can’t build on a process without first finding out its flaws. In order to improve results businesses must first be able to gain actionable insights into the onboarding process to find out which areas need refining.
This may be why 26% of business leaders have chosen to add process intelligence to their toolkit of technology. By collecting, merging and analysing data a business can discover patterns and observations to better customer experience and new operational efficiencies. All of which can save money and help to improve the rate of customer retention.
5. Automation vs relationship building
There is a fine line between providing a secure onboarding process and leaving potential customers frustrated. A good onboarding strategy strikes the right balance between human interaction and intelligent automation. Investing in the right tools to help customers efficiently prove identity and submit supportive documents whilst incorporating some human element along the way ultimately saves a company time and money and is well worth the effort.
