5 Steps to Creating Frictionless Customer Onboarding Experiences
During our recent webinar with Yodlee, Forrester, and American Banker, we discussed how bank customers’ have evolved in the past 10 years, and what kind of customer experiences that banks need to build in 2017. Below are the 5 steps that banks can take to improve their customer onboarding experience this year.
Blend Human and Digital Experiences
Forrester uncovered a surprising statistic: millennials are just as likely to use bank branches as other generations (50-55%). This demonstrates the importance of ensuring that your onboarding must extend seamlessly across both in-person and online experiences. Rather than abandoning bank branches altogether, Forrester’s research indicates that consumer application and buying paths are utilizing more channels than previous generations.
Make Mobile the Hub of Your Onboarding Experiences
Forrester also found that the percentage of each generation that visits a branch to research financial products is pretty steady at 25%. What’s important to note is that for older generations, the next most important channel for research falls dramatically, while millennials are also visiting bank websites, asking family and friends, and visiting comparison sites. It’s no surprise that daily banking activities have increasingly shifted to digital channels, given the fact that 56% of all website traffic is now coming from mobile devices. We expect the trend to continue towards more research and applications being performed on mobile devices, which means that your customer onboarding strategy should begin with mobile.
Transform Digital Customer Experiences
It’s clear that digital is increasingly the place where consumers will be interacting with banks and financial institutions. In order to capitalize on this shift, it’s imperative that you either inspire or facilitate a digital transformation within your organization. This transformation includes changing the culture; being quick to pivot, and striving for faster innovation. Without this transformation, you stand to lose the customers of the future who are already looking outside of traditional banking institutions for help with their financial planning and to purchase financial products.
Use Data to Differentiate and Personalize Experiences
While more consumers are starting their onboarding experiences on mobile devices, that doesn’t mean every customer is. Transforming customer experience is not about moving everything to digital and forgetting the branch experience entirely—it means leveraging data to better understand how your customers want to receive information, and what channels work best for them for onboarding. Personalizing experiences can include:
- Integrating e-signature platforms to cut down on printing
- Responsive designs of forms to adapt to all kinds of devices and screen sizes
- Ability to start and stop an application from multiple devices and channels
Leveraging data will enable you to tailor digital customer onboarding experiences to your specific customer base.
Stay Customer-Led, not Technology-Led
Your consumers don’t care about your new back-end system—they just want a great user experience and the ability to apply easily for your banking products. Keep in mind that your technology is only as good as the user experience it allows you to create, so don’t assume that purchasing new software will automatically solve your onboarding issues. Take the time to understand the needs of your customers and the capabilities of various software platforms, and plan a course for marrying the two.