Our lives are increasingly digital and that’s a big opportunity for banks and other financial companies to attract customers. Fast and intelligent customer experience is becoming more and more significant and the companies are not immune to this customer expectation. As a result, it’s important to have an effective customer onboarding process in place that will engage new customers and help them get up to speed with the company. The first line of defence against high dropuot rates is a strong client onboarding process. Customers are more likely to dropuot in the early stages of the business relationship. A performing digital – or electronic – onboarding process is an opportunity to make the right first impression and this is why electronic onboarding is a critical part of the customer experience for financial institutions.
If a financial institution fails to do this, it could be saying goodbye to many potential customers. This implies that traditional banks and financial institutions, are investing in digital transformation and are also starting to implement tools and elements to meet with the customer’s demands who expect easy and instant access to the company through multiple touchpoints.
Definitely simple digital onboarding is a key first step to customer acquisition and retention.
In this post, we explore how you can, with the right tools, create an engaging digital onboarding process.
First of all what differentiates digital or electronic onboarding from traditional, in-person onboarding is in the name: it is completely online. Customers are free to begin the process wherever they’d like, whenever they’d like, instead of sitting in a branch office or store and going through the process. To understand what is the best digital onboarding experience for users and clients there are some important points to be considered and improved with the adequate tools, such as: what do the users like about the company current electronic onboarding process, where do they find any trouble, thus to study the bounce rate and understand the weak spots, how to communicate with the users and explain them how to use the electronic onboarding tools, how to create a good marketing plan to attract potential customers.
The first step to create a perfect online onboarding process is to know the customers and their goals.
What the company perceive as a problem can be different in what the customer actually perceive and want, therefore the company needs to understand and provide assistance along the complete onboarding process, the understanding of the customers goals is more important than ever in the online experience, thus the best way to improve this step is to talk to the customers directly and analyse the initial data to create the leanest way to onboard a great number of customers and define the target audience. Besides knowing what the customers want and their goals comes the definition of what kind of customers the company wants to target, it’s important to know who the company has to target in order to create an engaging experience for them. From professionals in the financial industry to younger generations from the digital age, it’s necessary to clearly identify the characteristics of the potential customer base and current platform customers, using performing and effective tools is possible to analyse this kind of data and move in the right way.
Once the company knows who to target and what the customers wants the next step is to design and create a frictionless and smooth digital onboarding process. During digital customer onboarding, the customer experience plays a significant role. For that reason, it is very important to create experiences that are easy to understand and simple to use. Companies and organizations, in general need to identify what steps are unnecessary to complete the digital customer onboarding and should get rid of them. The to do list must include: checking the electronic customer onboarding data to underline any bottleneck issue that isn’t helping customers achieve what they want and at the same time find out what are the areas that are best helping customers to solve their problems.
Remember, always focus on the customer goals more that the company’s ones, the bigger need is to solve their problems at every step by anticipating them. To improve furthermore the customer experience of digital onboarding and to ensure you have a competitive advantage over competitors it’s important to make things as simple as possible by creating a very smooth digital customer onboarding. The navigation should be very easy and the available tools should not need further explanation. Collect minimum data as possible while onboarding a customer, the digital onboarding process needs to be very precise for the customer and also very clear, so it’s helpful to explain what should be done and why it needs to be done at each step of data collection. Lastly, bring visual elements to guide the customer at every stage of the onboarding process. The more difficult and technical terms you use, the more likely your customers are to get confused and frustrated, use simple, straightforward language to explain the products and help customers understand what they need to do during onboarding. Use friendly, encouraging language to motivate customers to continue through the process. Keep it simple and fast, don’t make customers fill out multiple applications in separate systems, for example allowing customers to upload documents during the application process, instead of having it done via mail or in person, also helps speed things along, while creating a better experience for everyone.
All the more reasons the companies better don’t fail on providing an effective process on every possible device, they have to make sure to offer mobile-friendly processes so to allow the customers to be free to engage with online boarding whenever they need and wherever they want without problems.
Another big element that brings new customers and improves their loyalty is understanding their need and personalize the onboarding process accordingly.
It’s better to not have the same onboarding process for all of the customers and understand who the customers are and their aspirations, desires, and motivations to provide a personalized electronic onboarding experience. This will make it easy for customers to quickly onboard and start off with their first transaction. The understanding activity starts with data collection from the initial set of customers and keep optimizing digital onboarding workflow till it gets right. Personalized digital onboarding helps elevate customer experience and also helps reduce dropuot rates,
Content is king and the biggest element in ensuring a successful digital onboarding experience for target audience. Content is as important as structure and most of all the first impression is given by the company communication and image so building a performing marketing strategy is essential.
The most important part of any marketing campaign is to build a strong foundation and create a plan for success, if you want the best chance at achieving new customers the strategy should include all the digital marketing efforts, including those for existing customers. Setting a performing plan for new digital infrastructure, updates on the current digital channels, and of course for seamless onboarding experience is mandatory, but even more important is to be up to date with the latest marketing trends. The last innovations marketing and communication wise include mechanics like gamification and social media integration. This could be achieved for example through integrated social media throughout the onboarding process and making this part of the process easy and fun.
Allow users to link existing social media, email or bank accounts with their new account, this will automatically fill in a lot of fields for them and eliminate the need for unnecessary typing.
Offer optional profile pictures and emojis, which help users personalize their accounts and add personality.
It is very likely to lose customers and potential customers due to poor customer experience strategy during the digital onboarding process and this can have a problematic consequence in terms of customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Customer digital onboarding should be user friendly, clear. fast, smooth and fun. When customers experience this kind of treatment, they become loyal and more importantly they become brand ambassadors. So, making your customer experience the best can be the strongest competitive advantage.
