FileInvite recently conducted a survey of business leaders and found that great customer onboarding experiences share 4 common characteristics. Learn more.
FileInvite recently conducted a survey of over 50 business leaders from various industries, including financial services, accounting, higher education, and law, and found that great customer onboarding experiences share four core common characteristics. According to respondents, great onboarding processes are:
Nearly two-thirds of customers – 63% – make purchase decisions based on the ease and convenience of onboarding processes. In the words of the founder of Andrew Griffith CPA, new customer onboarding should aim “to make my client onboarding experience as painless as possible for each client while ensuring compliance with the applicable regulatory obligations.”
Having clearly defined and communicated objectives and goalposts is the first step to mitigating customer loss in onboarding processes. “Be proactive to streamline information up front,” says Angela Tait, who works in the People Ops department of Tait Consulting LLC. “Nothing is more daunting than information that is contradictory and unorganized.”
To ensure that no unnecessary frustration accumulates over miscommunication, organizations in regulated industries should clarify legal requirements that preempt any new business relationship. Jared Weitz, CEO/Founder of United Capital Source, captures this point: “In the financial services sector where we operate, we have found that making a client onboarding process great comes down to managing expectations. From the beginning, we have clarified to our clients that they must sign and review specific paperwork. Additionally, we note that the paperwork is required by the government to regulate the industry and protect clients. By setting that expectation from the beginning, clients typically have no issues filling out the necessary paperwork to work with us.”
Rote tasks such as sending the same information to multiple destinations can quickly sour the customer onboarding experience. You can create a better experience by reducing redundancy and ensuring that customers only have to send information once to fulfill all requirements. As Debbie Winkelbauer, CEO of Surf Search explains, “Things like legal documents and payroll forms can be sent alongside the offer; why wait?”
Rachel Ehrlich, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Klutch Technologies, says, “Client onboarding experiences can be pretty tricky, especially for financial services. You want to have the most positive experience for your users, but you also need to conduct adequate due diligence and receive sensitive information.” Gathering customer PII and documentation for compliance needs defined efficient pathways to reduce churn in complex onboarding processes.
Learn how Financial Services organizations can leverage FileInvite »
Organizations can improve their customer onboarding experiences – especially within regulated industries – by following these four steps.
Traditional onboarding processes in financial services, such as loan application approval, involve the exchange of dozens of signed documents. Implementing digital signature technology radically reduces turnaround times for signed document collection.
Only 12% of organizations invest in designing onboarding experiences from the customer’s perspective. As a result, the majority of new customers and new hires report that their experiences were tedious and deficient in necessary information.
Rather than guess how the customer might find your onboarding experience, use surveys at strategic times throughout the process to collect real, honest feedback from your customers.
Automated self-service options, such as client document portals that offer secure and centralized document repositories, give new customers control over much of the timing of onboarding tasks, eliminating the need to sort through lengthy email threads and schedule the delivery of hard copies.
Today’s enterprises use an average of 110 unique software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. When evaluating new SaaS options, the logistics of integration should come into discussion first. Gone are the days when businesses expected to shoulder the costs of custom-coded integrations to incorporate new services. Out-of-the-box integrations for popular cloud applications have become a new requirement for optimized onboarding processes.
Onboarding new customers in today’s heavily regulated industries has become a critical bottom line challenge. For the last three years, financial crime compliance costs have increased, resulting in a 95% rise over Q4 2019 totals. FileInvite’s SOC 2 Type 2 document collection platform allows new customers to directly upload all compliance-related documents to a single repository, where progress can be tracked on both ends in real time.
This end-to-end secure connection reduces hassle, eliminates the need for PII exchanges through insecure email servers and hard copies, and helps organizations deliver a pleasant, efficient onboarding process.
To learn more and request a demo, visit FileInvite today.
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