Author: Jaime Ramirez, Founder and CEO Preventor
Digital onboarding became a key part for companies in order to optimize processes, improve their conversion rates and provide greater security throughout the customer lifecycle, but common mistakes in its application can also have repercussions for these organizations, which have the opportunity to take corrective actions in time so as not to suffer the leakage of users and also the loss of money.
In a highly competitive scenario, and on the verge of the world entering a probable recession, companies cannot afford to lose customers due to bad onboarding processes that deteriorate the experience and cause a brand's products and services not to be recommended by its users.
A bad digital onboarding experience can undermine customers' trust in a brand, make them immediately drop out of the process and thereby impact their metrics. Companies that are still not aware of this should stop and analyze how they are doing it, and those companies that fail should change because there is not much room for maneuver, and those that are doing well cannot stop because the competition does not stop in the adoption of innovations.
Here are some common and, above all, avoidable mistakes in the digital onboarding processes that could cause you to lose clients in 2023:
When a user starts a digital onboarding process in turn companies start a race against the clock in which the level of expertise and effectiveness define who is the winner amidst increasingly fierce competition. Consumers are becoming increasingly demanding of onboarding processes and evidence of this is that financial services app abandonment rates increased globally from 63% in 2020 to 68% in 2021.
As users' digital awareness increases, they are less willing to face cumbersome processes with long response times and communication failures that impact their experience from the beginning of the relationship. Therefore, companies must prioritize fast user service supported by automation, simplifying the steps of the process as much as possible, without risking security, and putting the experience at the forefront, since this is the first impression that consumers will take away from their products and services.
A successful onboarding process will be one that in a few steps leads users to complete registration in a barrier-free application, but at the same time has a solid technological infrastructure that is impenetrable to fraud or money laundering attempts.
Faced with the tsunami of information that app users are exposed to on a daily basis, companies must be careful not to saturate them further and provide clear, direct and targeted communication so that consumers are not deterred from joining.
The key is to prioritize the information and present it in an organized way so that users make conscious decisions and do not generate the opposite effect by saturating them with data that will not be useful and will generate even more doubts.
Companies must be concerned that their onboarding process is made clear to the different consumer profiles that access the tools, so they must be ready to guide them through the process and offer real-time tools that allow them to move forward smoothly, clearing some frictions that may occur in necessary steps, but that can be cumbersome. In summary, the way of communicating is key so that the customer gets exactly what he needs to know according to the stage he is in, and in case of doubts, the companies know how to offer this support through tutorials, personalized answers, among others.
The worst thing that companies can do in a digitalized context like the current one is to ignore the disruption caused by technologies such as automation and artificial intelligence in customer onboarding, while continuing to cling to obsolete schemes that only jeopardize the security of their users.
Therefore, in onboarding processes, companies should give greater priority to identity verification through biometric solutions for facial and voice recognition that allow them to fight against identity fraud and thus provide greater protection to their customers.
These tools have reduced the time required to complete onboarding registrations and now customer onboarding is completed in less than 60 seconds, thanks to the solutions offered by Preventor through an integrated platform that simplifies the creation of an account in an application.
Many companies in the techno-finance sector, known as fintech, have understood this and for several years have adopted solutions that simplify customer onboarding through simple but very useful integrations, such as requiring a selfie to verify identity before creating an account, or verifying the authenticity of personal documents by means of photographs taken by the users themselves and sent to the various platforms for verification with artificial intelligence.
When a user completes a digital onboarding process, he/she seals a type of contract that companies must faithfully respect, since the duration of this relationship over time will depend on its full compliance. When a person completes a registration and opens an account for a product or service, he or she is entrusting one of the most valuable assets, if not the most valuable asset in today's digital world: data.
Ensuring the security of the information that users entrust to the platforms and the proper management of this data is key for companies in the digital world, since poor treatment can not only lead to million-dollar fines, but also to reputational damage that can be irreparable over time. Not for nothing, in customer onboarding processes, data privacy is an aspect that generates special attention and 92% of users in the world have acknowledged to be concerned about this issue in 2022.
It is important to know that the customer lifecycle does not end with this first registration, but is built on a day-to-day basis and based on trust. Therefore, companies cannot limit their efforts only to ensure that this incorporation is effective in the first instance, but must follow it up and therefore the adoption of analytical tools is essential to be able to accompany the different stages.
With this in mind, companies face the challenge in 2023 of improving their onboarding processes with a focus on the customer and their experience, ensuring an agile and at the same time secure process, in which technology is a pillar of the transformations that must be made to ensure a people-friendly scheme. In addition to integrating these solutions, companies cannot forget that behind all this execution they need to listen to their customers and be open to innovations, so they will need a team committed to understanding the needs of consumers, their concerns about information management and above all to help them make this transition in the most organic way possible.
