How Banks Can Improve Business Customer Onboarding
In our webinar with AITE Group and American Banker, we discussed the challenges that banks continue to have with business customer onboarding and a few key opportunities that these institutions have to improve onboarding and overall customer experience. In this blog, we’ve compiled data from a variety of surveys in 2017 to highlight the top customer pain points during the onboarding process and propose steps your bank can take to improve onboarding and overall customer experience.
Onboarding Has Gone Multichannel
In a survey of over 1,000 U.S. businesses generating between $100,000-$2,000,000 in annual revenue, AITE Group found that about ~25% still prefer visiting a bank branch to apply for most banking products. However, the most commonly preferred channel is via a desktop or laptop, with smartphones and tablets making up another ~20%.
Additionally, 73% of customers reported that the ability to begin an account opening digitally, and then complete it via a different channel, was either “important” or “very important.” This should be a big signal to banks that their onboarding process needs to be seamless over digital channels or they will be missing out on a significant portion of potential customers.
Onboarding Costs Are Skyrocketing
In a recent survey conducted by GT News, it’s apparent that banks are still struggling to onboard clients in a timely and cost-effective manner. Banks are spending an average of $70M USD per year on Know Your Customer (KYC) investments but still average at least 30 days to onboard a customer. When surveying bank customers, the most common pain point was “deal with many different people within the bank during the process” and “different banks ask for different documents and information—no common standard”.
Onboarding Is A Critical Drag-On Customer Experience
This alarming data around banking customer experience is understandable once you start asking banks about a key area—customer onboarding. On a recent webinar Improving Small Business Banking Customer Onboarding, we found that only 23% of banks have an omnichannel account opening process in place. More alarming, almost as many banks that had no idea what omnichannel even means.
Our survey also found that almost 40% of banks do not have any kind of system in place to allow for banking products to be applied for digitally (another 40% reported that only 1 in 4 products was digitally-enabled). That means roughly 80% of banks have little to no capability to allow their customers to apply for products digitally.
Finally, 45% of banks reported that it takes 2 weeks or more to onboard their customers, with another 44% reporting they weren’t sure how long it takes. This is a critical shortfall given how millennial banking trends have shifted over the past few years.
What’s Next?
The data is clear—your customers want the onboarding process to be digitally enabled; they want fewer interactions with fewer of your employees; they want to be able to switch channels seamlessly during the onboarding process. The good news is that our customer onboarding platform solution can help you improve in all of these areas.