When you sign up to a new bank, you want the experience to be seamless. Afterall, first impressions count. Banks that provide a poor customer onboarding experience face losing customers. Don’t fall at the first hurdle.
68% of people abandoned the digital onboarding process for a financial product — that’s up from 63% back in 2020.
As the first touchpoint in the customer journey, a bank’s onboarding procedure is critical to building profitable long-term relationships. Automation can play a crucial part in satisfying customers and laying the foundation for ongoing customer experience. Before explaining how, it’s worth briefly reflecting on why the traditional onboarding process is long due an overhaul.
For years, onboarding in banks has been a paper-based process involving different internal teams. Multiple handovers, requests for information, and a lack of standardization have led to a typically slow process that can take days. Or even weeks.
Given that customers have become increasingly accustomed to hyper-convenient digital experiences from their favourite brands, it’s easy to see why a new customer onboarding experience in banking is so crucial. It’s easy to see what needs to change too.
Put simply, your bank’s onboarding process has to feel fast and intuitive. And it needs to be omnichannel. Customers should be able to interact with you via their device of choice, be that smartphone, tablet or laptop; and be able to switch between them, continuing the exact same journey right where they left off.
This means embracing a whole new approach to onboarding.
Automation lets you eliminate the inefficiencies and errors inherent in manual onboarding. It gives you the ability to capture, digitize and visualize all of your customer data in a single place too, rather than trying to locate it across siloed systems.
In addition, it can streamline the compliance aspects of onboarding (like KYC) by enabling a slicker authentication process — and creating business rules that stop customer cases getting stuck or falling between the gaps.
It’s these improvements that ultimately lead to a superior service that can help you lower onboarding abandonment rates.
1. Speed up labor-intensive processes
Data verification, KYC and document processing are just some of the tasks included in the customer onboarding process, which can take time when carried out manually. Data collection, entry and cross-checking information can be automated, and streamlined to speed up the onboarding process.
You can even integrate technologies such as optical character recognition (OCR) to scan and extract customer data from forms. It can also validate the authenticity of documents and highlight anything that’s suspicious. It’s much faster than manual review.
2. Minimize errors
When processes are mapped out in workflows and automated, it guarantees that all steps are followed precisely as specified. It minimizes the risk of human error, including data replication and handovers between internal teams, which can cause frustrating delays for customers.
The elimination of manual data entry, as mentioned above means that the risk of employees making mistakes is eliminated, ensuring accuracy which eliminates potential problems later down the line.
3. Ensure Compliance
Automating processes allows you to set specific rules and policies within processes that are always followed. This means you can ensure compliance and manage risk.
If you use a low-code automation platform, you have the agility to easily amend processes to make sure that the latest regulations are consistently adhered to, reducing the risk of regulatory fines and reputational harm.
4. Increase customer satisfaction
The speed and accuracy offered by automating the onboarding process will delight customers at a time when expectations are for things to happen as quickly as possible.
Automating onboarding also provides an omnichannel experience, allowing customers to complete the process as they wish, be that in branch or via mobile, tablet or desktop. And the digitization helps with clear communication. Automated updates can be sent throughout the process via text or app notifications to keep them informed of the progress of their application and alert them of any further actions they need to take to keep the process moving.
5. Increase employee satisfaction
Automation will delight employees, which in turn will make them more positive and more productive. They won’t have the burden of having to complete monotonous, repetitive manual tasks and instead can focus on tasks that add more value.
When the onboarding process is automated, they will have access to comprehensive, real-time information that can give them a better overview of the status of customer applications so they can provide better customer service, and help them to make informed decisions, helping them to work efficiently and effectively.
6. Visibility and connectivity across departments
A low-code automation platform provides standardized workflows that are integrated with bank end systems, such as CRM and core banking platforms, and connects departments across a single application. This facilitates seamless data transfer, eliminating the need to manually hand off data between teams to increase speed and accuracy.
By routing applications through standardized workflows, it ensures that each task or approval is performed by the appropriate personnel, following a consistent and auditable process. This reduces errors that can occur due to miscommunication, delays, or missed steps in manual handoffs.
On average, it took a leading US bank 59 days to onboard a new customer. Since implementing Bizagi Automation, onboarding time has been cut down to just nine days — an 85% reduction.
With our automated solution, the onboarding experience isn’t just quicker — but more accurate too. Freed up from manual processes, its employees also have time to focus on other high-value tasks, such as offering customers more support with other services.
In an era of heightened customer expectations, banks that deliver friction-free onboarding experiences have an instant competitive advantage.
Bizagi Automation is a low-code solution that anyone in your organisation can use, regardless of their technical experience. By automating complex, back-office processes, it gives you the ability to deliver a whole new customer onboarding experience in banking.
Ready to see how Bizagi Automation could transform your bank’s customer onboarding process? You can find out more in our ebook The Essential Guide to Modernizing Banking Operations.
