Digital customer onboarding is an essential component of the modern business landscape.
It involves using digital technology to streamline and simplify the process for customers starting an online relationship with a company — as it is often the first impression a customer will have of a business, it is absolutely critical to make the customer experience as seamless and enjoyable as possible.
By taking advantage of automation, digital customer onboarding can save the time and money involved in manual onboarding while providing a better experience for customers. This can include everything from automated sign up and Know Your Customer (KYC) forms to personalized welcome emails or even interactive tutorials that teach customers how to use your products or services.
With digital customer onboarding, businesses are able to move and scale into new markets faster than ever before while improving the overall user experience, strengthening a company’s anti-fraud security and allowing businesses to maintain compliance with global KYC and anti-money laundering (AML) regulations.
Digital Onboarding: Key Metrics
While there are many different factors that go into a successful customer onboarding journey, there are two key metrics that are used to measure whether an onboarding process has been effectively designed and configured:
- Friction rate is a measure of how difficult it is for customers to sign up for and use a product or service. It looks at how many steps and how long it takes to complete the process.
- Retention rate tells us if customers are using the product or service after they have completed the onboarding process. It shows us if customers find our product useful enough that they keep coming back — or if they abandon the service before or after the completion of the onboarding process.
4 Steps of Successful Onboarding
Successful customer onboarding relies on a delicate balance of different components and considerations including User Experience (UX) design, software and communication. Below, we outline some of the basic steps that need to be taken or considered in order to build a robust, effective and user-centric onboarding experience.
1. Transparency
It’s important to set realistic expectations for your customers before they begin the onboarding journey. This means telling them what they can expect from your product or service, how long it will take for them to access those products or services, and what kind of information they will need to provide.
By being transparent about these aspects, you can avoid frustrating or disappointing customers while they are progressing or have completed the onboarding journey.
In addition to communicating what the onboarding process will involve and result in, it helps to consistently communicate their progress during the onboarding journey and to provide a constant means for them to gain more information on why a certain step is being taken during the process.
This will ensure that customers feel fully informed about their submission of information, and will help to build trust in your business.
This leads to the final point, which is how important it is to provide accessible and efficient customer service in order to keep customers happy. This includes responding quickly to their inquiries, offering assistance when they struggle with the onboarding journey, and being friendly and helpful throughout the process.
Doing this will help create a positive experience for customers, which can lead to increased loyalty and better long-term relationships with them.
2. Know your customer’s challenges
Truly understanding the problems and challenges that your customers face — and which have led them to your product or service — is a key factor for a successful onboarding journey.
Understanding the challenges facing customers will allow you to design an onboarding journey that does not overburden them with unnecessary or overly-complex information requests, and will also allow you to communicate how access to your services will help them address the problems and/or challenges they want to overcome.
It is also important to ask customers for feedback about their experience so you can improve the process. Having a responsive customer service team that understands your product and the onboarding journey is the most effective means of helping customers when they have any questions or issues with the product, service or onboarding journey.
3. Use Onboarding to Enhance your Offering
Incorporating onboarding into your overall product offering is a crucial and powerful opportunity that should not be missed. Doing this effectively can help customers learn how to use your product or service while being onboarded — which allows them to draw value from the process. Onboarding can be a helpful guide for customers to understand how to use your product or service, once they gain access to it.
Providing useful information or instructions on your product/service during onboarding helps increase customer satisfaction by allowing users to understand the product quickly and to hit the ground running once they have access to it.
For example, this can involve providing instructions on how to navigate your platform, guides on how to customize options, and insights on the possibilities offered by your product or service’s functionalities.
4. Keep communication flowing
As with all customer relationships, communication is key.
One of the most simple ways to further solidify a relationship with a customer is to send a followup email after they have completed the customer onboarding journey.
The followup email should include information about the customer’s onboarding journey, such as what was discussed during the process, any resources that were provided, and if there are any new features or updates that have been released since the onboarding journey.
Additionally, it may be beneficial to send a survey or ask for feedback in order to understand how satisfied the customer is with their experience. This will help to ensure that you can build on real-world insights from customers in order to refine the experience for future customers.
Finally, following up with customers after an onboarding journey can be used as an opportunity to encourage them to take action, for example by trying out a new product offering that can further enhance their experience or help them reach their goals. By using automation, you can present products or services that are specifically suited to an individual customer based on their responses in the onboarding journey.
Benefits of having an effective customer onboarding process
An effective customer onboarding process helps people understand how to use a product or service. It makes it easier for customers to get started and helps them have better experiences with your business. It can also help your company build customer loyalty and generate consistent income streams in the long run.
Customer onboarding should be tailored to each individual customer’s needs. It should focus on helping customers understand how to use your product or service as quickly and efficiently as possible. A good onboarding process will pass customers through only the requisite KYC/AML checks, based on their compliance risk profile and how it relates to your specific industry.
It can also include tutorials, demonstration videos, helpful articles, webinars, and live support. It should also provide resources for people who need more help or have questions.
An effective customer onboarding process also helps build relationships between customers and a company. When customers understand how to use a product or service properly, they’re more likely to stick around and become loyal customers. Companies can show their appreciation by offering rewards or discounts for loyalty, which further strengthens customer relationships and boosts revenue.
Finally, an effective customer onboarding process should be continually monitored and updated. As technology and customer needs change, so should the onboarding process. Companies should look for ways to improve their current onboarding processes and ensure that they meet customers’ expectations. Taking the time to do this properly will help them provide better experiences for their customers and keep them coming back.
Conclusion
By having an effective customer onboarding process in place, companies can increase customer satisfaction, build loyalty, and generate more revenue over time. It makes it easier for customers to use a product or service properly, helps them understand how to get the most out of your company’s offerings, and builds relationships. With a solid onboarding strategy in place, companies can create better experiences for their customers while boosting revenue and scaling efficiently.
How KYC-Chain can help
KYC-Chain offers a market-leading end-to-end onboarding solution that allows our partners to efficiently and securely automate their customer onboarding journey. Using proprietary technology that can be seamlessly integrated with a business’ unique API, our automated onboarding technology allows companies to customize onboarding journeys for customers in diverse global jurisdictions. For regulated businesses, our onboarding technology provides automated KYC/AML onboarding that ensures you remain compliant with complex and constantly-evolving global financial regulations.
Looking for an automated onboarding solution for your business? Get in touch and we’ll be happy to arrange a demo.
