Onboarding is the process by which users become part of a company’s customer base so that they can agree to receive its services or products. It also brings many benefits to companies.
First, it offers them opportunities to comprehensively understand their customer needs – as a process during which, based on the data they collected, they can help the customer, get to know them, find out more about them and offer other services or products tailored to their needs.
Onboarding process can be divided into three types:
- On-site onboarding: the traditional onboarding process where the individual visits the company office to provide data and identification or biometrics;
- Semi-on-site onboarding: the companies provide electronic documents to the new customers to fill at their homes. But they have to visit the company office to submit them or send them via land mail;
- Digital onboarding: the currently most popular onboarding process type is also known as online or remote onboarding. With complete digitization, individuals can stay at their home or office to complete the process faster but with the same security and guarantee.
Nowadays to effectively outsmart competitors and grow your company it’s necessary to make business accessible anywhere anytime and with any device, truth is that it’s even more simple than it may seem because in the last few years technology has made digital onboarding much easier for companies and customers across all industries from financial services to public institutions and so on.
Effective digital onboarding is the beginning of a good and long-term relationship with the customer, it’s a solution to reach and interact with more customers online, no matter the industry.
Customer onboarding has changed rapidly in recent years. In some areas, providers are creating simple, low cost, intuitive digital experiences that have fueled the growth of their business and brands, most of this growth is due to the constant R&D investments in digitalization.
Digitalization is the most direct way for most industries and sectors to implement and improve their customer digital onboarding. With digital onboarding, you get speed, fewer errors, compliance management, reduced manual work, and improved customer satisfaction.
Digital onboarding offers to the users a way to seamlessly become accustomed and move smoothly through all the onboarding process in an engaging way and all of this takes seconds, minutes at most, and helps achieve the best possible customer experience.
Financial services organizations or event product companies face many challenges in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous market place. To respond to these challenges, companies must take strategies and innovations and turn them into reality, also this challenge will likely see organizations reduce, remove or standardize the long list of options they currently provide on products, and simplify their offer as a result.
But sometimes the company digital innovation process is not well structured and thus getting started on the digital transformation journey can be a challenge.
A well-structured process can’t ignore the needs of the customer and therefore it becomes essential to define procedures and registrations for every single step, from planning to after-sales assistance, in order to maximize user satisfaction, unfortunately we are not yet there because many onboarding systems are broken, too many companies struggle to fill the gap between strategy and results and as a result it takes too long for the customer to complete the digital onboarding process and fulfillment can take weeks or months, for larger purchases such as buying a car.
These new services have created a gap between customer expectations and the reality of what most organizations offer. Digital onboarding processes fail for most customers who do not meet the perfect profile criteria to complete the process in the digital channel. This generates customer friction and significant drop out. Too often companies create realistic, logical plans but are unable to execute them properly. Many companies do not realize what is required to convert their vision into specific tasks, setting milestones for progress and failing to create contingency plans is a common mistake.
There are many potential customers that drop out during onboarding due to articulated and time-consuming identity verification, a simple, well-structured and fast onboarding process boosts and increases customer satisfaction.
The most important thing that has to be well structured and well thought out is the workflow system which is going to be the base for all the digital onboarding process.
Workflows are practically the flow of activities that allows things to get done in an organization. Intelligent workflows are predictive, automated, agile and transparent and the implementation of intelligent workflows for end-to-end customer innovation and engagement has to be supported by a performing digital platform.
The platform should extend across business departments, unifying finance, marketing, sales, service and IT, as well as bridge external business partner tools and units.
In order to succeed with digital transformation, 80% of decision makers agree that they must integrate business processes across organizational boundaries and legacy systems, this approach will accelerate digital transformation and help design efficient and intelligent workflows. A unified and integrated platform can help improve foot traffic in stores, reduce onboarding cycle time and improve customer NPS score.
Most importantly it is necessary to develop intelligent workflows that create value as a cost-effective processes and create as many integrated tasks as possible, design a scalable AI-based platforms to accommodate fluctuations in customer demand and consistent and personalized customer experience across all channels.
A client-centric approach, when designing a digital onboarding platform, is the only way a business can grow to keep its clients/customers at the center stage.
When you understand your customer’s requirements and design a workflow around their needs, you improve customer experience.
Creating personalized digital onboarding processes can help to gain an edge over competitors and assert the company’s digital image, not to mention that well-structured digital workflows also increase the internal team’s satisfaction by reducing the time they spend on manual tasks, subject to many operational risks adopting remote unattended online channels saves customers’ time by enabling self-service experience and automated onboarding & origination processes.
With an effective e performative workflow system simplicity becomes a natural consequence. With a functional online onboarding, the whole process is much more straightforward and easy to understand, a smooth transition from paper to digital processes brings better data arrangements, user-friendliness and a much neat data even easier to analyze later on.
A simple digital onboarding process brings also to a faster online onboarding experience. When the customer onboarding is rapid, the clients get a quicker response, feedback and confirmation. Along with an immediate process, it also follows all the steps and secure data verification. A faster process reduces the cost per interaction and allows the company to improve its real-time data analysis and insight, thus improving responsiveness, quality and accuracy, delivering greater value to employees, partners and customers.
