Learn how to deliver a seamless and efficient onboarding experience for your clients, while also safeguarding all personally identifiable information (PII).
Your customer onboarding process sets the tone for your business relationships and plays a large role in determining how much value your customers will get out of your product.
Friction is frustrating for you and your customers — it slows down your onboarding timeline and complicates an already complex process.
When onboarding is difficult or unpleasant, companies experience user dropout rates as high as 60%. When the onboarding experience is welcoming, that dropout rate shrinks to 24%.
In this guide, we will define customer onboarding, explore methods of removing friction, identify and address bottlenecks in the onboarding process, and discuss software solutions for document sharing.
Customer onboarding includes all the activities involved in initiating a new business relationship. In other words, every introductory email, every signed contract, and every how-to guide is all a part of your new client onboarding process.
You can benefit from a strong client onboarding strategy. In fact, 82% of enterprise organizations say their onboarding strategy drives value. When your onboarding process is smooth, your customers get more value out of your product. This in turn increases your retention, which is important because obtaining a new customer is between 5 and 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.
Your onboarding process is also important because it sets the tone for your business relationship. If your client onboarding process is difficult, confusing, or tedious, then clients may interpret that to mean your business relationship will also be strained. However, if your onboarding process is helpful, professional, and delivers value, then that’s how your clients will see you as well.
The average onboarding process for a new corporate client can take as long as 100 days. That’s 100 days of follow-up emails, requests for documents, and reentering data on form after form —chores which you can reduce or eliminate with a better onboarding process.
Consider these steps to remove friction from your client onboarding process:
Helpful tools like how-to guides and FAQs can relieve pressure on your customer support team while also offering enduring value to your customers.
In the digital age, business relationships can involve large amounts of information: contracts, terms of service, spec sheets, style guides, and more. Making your document collection process streamlined yet secure is an effective way to level up your customer onboarding process.
Use Automation. Whether you’re using CRM software to track your emails, AI-powered chatbots to enhance your customer service, or OCR to process scanned documents, look for ways to automate onboarding activities for a more consistent client experience.
Good security does not have to come at the expense of a good user experience.
Seventy percent of online businesses fail due to bad usability, so finding the right solution involves balancing useable designs with secure technologies.
A portmanteau of “finance” and “technology,” fintech is the innovative use of technology in the financial industry. While fintech can help financial institutions balance their high-security needs with a customer-friendly user experience, they are not without their difficulties.
Fintech has to be technologically robust enough to meet the security requirements of a bank, yet user-friendly enough to be helpful to users with limited technical training. As such, a lot of banks simply don’t have the technology or resources to implement a fintech solution of their own.
To circumvent this limitation, many banks use third-party fintech software. This lets banks enjoy the benefits of fintech without the burden of creating a bespoke solution.
Major bottlenecks in the onboarding process include requesting, collecting, and organizing documents. One of the easiest ways to remove friction from your onboarding process is to accelerate your document collection process.
File-sharing software is an easy way to accelerate your onboarding process. That’s because file-sharing software acts as a centralized hub for all your documents, creating a one-stop shop where both you and your clients can see at a glance what documents you have, what you need, and what you’re missing.
KYC or “Know Your Customer” processes are due diligence procedures that banks and other financial institutions must follow. The primary goal of these processes is to detect fraud but at the cost of some extra time added to your onboarding process.
Similarly, AML (or “Anti-Money Laundering”) is a piece of legislation that requires financial institutions to collect extra documentation that can add time to your onboarding process but helps prevent money laundering in the process.
To accelerate your KYC/AML processes, use file-sharing software to collect documents faster and more securely. While this can’t eliminate these onboarding bottlenecks, it can help contribute to a frictionless onboarding process.
Your success depends on your ability to onboard new clients securely and efficiently. With the right software, customer onboarding can be an opportunity, rather than a burden.
FileInvite’s file-sharing software is helping organizations around the world share their documents quickly, securely, and efficiently.
Experience a more secure and customer-friendly onboarding process with FileInvite.
To learn more and request a demo, visit FileInvite today.
Learn what a customer onboarding process is and how to measure the efficacy of your organization's customer onboarding experience.
With CDD requirements becoming more complex, financial institutions must understand the different kinds of CDD processes. Here are 5 types of CDD...
Looking to incorporate AI into your role? If you're in the financial services vertical, you might want to start with your KYC process.