According to a Deloitte study, 38% of new bank customers abandon the account creation process if it is too complex or requires too much information. And yet, optimized customer onboarding can significantly convert visitors into new customers for a business establishment, and thus boost sales.
Fortunately, whether your company is heavily regulated by the LCB-FT or not, there are many solutions to perfect this integration and boost your transformation rate. In this article, we’ll give you 9 easy-to-follow tips to improve your remote customer onboarding process.
Remote customer onboarding and conversion rates: definition and challenges for your company
What is customer onboarding?
In the broadest sense, customer onboarding is the post-purchase process designed to support new users (B2B or B2C) in using the product or service they have just acquired. For example, this involves encouraging them to use it, showing them how to get the most out of it, and possibly reducing customer support requests. The main objective is to help customers benefit quickly from the advantages of the service, to boost the chances of repeat business.
In a B2B2C context, the definition is different because it’s earlier. In this case, customer onboarding refers to the process of acquiring or subscribing new users to your company’s services/products. For a bank, this means, for example, all the steps to be taken before a prospect can open a bank account. In the case of companies subject to LCB-FT regulations, customer onboarding must include verification of identity and solvency(KYC procedure).
Companies specializing in optimizing customer onboarding processes, such as Netheos, offer AI-based solutions to make the customer journey simple, fluid and fast, and thus optimize the conversion percentage.In a B2B2C context, the definition is different because it’s earlier. In this case, customer onboarding refers to the process of acquiring or subscribing new users to your company’s services/products. For a bank, this means, for example, all the steps to be taken before a prospect can open a bank account. In the case of companies subject to LCB-FT regulations, customer onboarding must include verification of identity and solvency(KYC procedure).
What is a conversion rate?
The conversion rate, or transformation rate, is a key performance indicator (KPI) that measures the percentage of users who have carried out a specific action, be it a purchase, a registration, or the downloading of content on a given website or application.
In the context of customer onboarding, the transformation percentage measures the percentage of users who have completed the remote subscription procedure and thus become customers of the company (or, as an existing customer, have subscribed to another service). In this context, the KPI is strongly correlated with the concept of customer retention, i.e. a company’s ability to keep users within the customer journey: the longer they stay, the greater the likelihood that they will convert.
Why is measuring your customer onboarding conversion percentage so important for your business?
The conversion rate of your customer onboarding process is a key indicator (KPI) for measuring the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. If your percentage is low, this means that your onboarding procedure is not effective enough to convince visitors to become customers.
By measuring the transformation percentage of your customer onboarding, you can identify problem phases and optimize them, boosting your sales and profitability.
The transformation percentage is also important for measuring customer satisfaction. If it’s high, it means your customers are satisfied with your onboarding and are convinced by your products or services.
What is a good conversion rate in customer onboarding?
How to measure your customer onboarding transformation rate
To measure the transformation percentage of your customer onboarding, you need to follow these successive steps:
- Use an analytics tool/software to track the user journey from onboarding to purchase/subscription.
- Retrieve the data corresponding to the number of users who started the procedure and the number who completed it.
- Calculate the transformation percentage by dividing the number of users who have completed the customer onboarding process by the number of users who have started it.
- To improve your onboarding process, you’ll need to identify exit points, i.e. the phases where users leave the onboarding process without completing it.
Since an example is worth a thousand explanations, let’s take the case of a mechanism for subscribing to a banking service: opening a CCP. Let’s say that over a given period, 300 people started the course but only 220 completed it. In this case, the conversion rate is 73.3% (CT = (220 / 300) x 100).
What is a "good" conversion rate for customer onboarding?
In reality, the answer to this question depends on many factors, such as the sector of activity, the product or service offered, the target market (B2B, B2C…), the type of company, etc. A customer onboarding KYC procedure, with its compulsory addition of remote identity verification steps, will therefore necessarily be more restrictive for a user than a more conventional process. Depending on the situation, the dropout rate may be higher.
To give you an idea, at Netheos we consider that the transformation percentage of a customer onboarding is considered “good” from :
- 55% for KYC procedures
- 65% for conventional procedures
For information, the average transformation percentage for a customer onboarding process is 20-30%. By way of comparison, Netheos customers record percentages of up to 87%.. Let’s take a look at how to boost this figure and get your sales off the ground.
Customer onboarding: 9 tips to boost your conversion rate!
Here is a list of our recommendations for optimizing your customer onboarding and gaining in transformation:
1. Simplify the onboarding process to make it easier to understand the steps involved.
The onboarding process can be long and tedious for customers. That’s why we advise you to shorten it by keeping only the essential or mandatory steps. The more of these you have, the greater the risk of dropping out. Indicating how many actions have been completed and how many remain to be done can give users visibility and encourage them to complete the customer onboarding process.
2. Use short, simple forms to avoid discouraging customers.
Registration forms can be daunting for customers. That’s why limiting fields to collect only mandatory data is another good practice for improving your conversion percentage. What’s more, this practice will make you more compliant with the RGPD. Also, we advise you to favor automatic field filling in order to very greatly reduce the friction encountered by users, especially on mobile. Numerous marketing tools or APIs such as that of société.com, for example, enable you to directly retrieve information such as the SIRET number, often indispensable in B2B applications.
3. Personalize customer support at every stage, with video tutorials and personalized messages.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, so is a video! For each of your progress points, we recommend including a short film sequence to show your customers how to accomplish the desired task. For example, in a Facematch identity verification KYC program, it might be a good idea to include a video tutorial explaining how to position your face so that it is correctly detected by the AI. And if video isn’t enough, you can also attach personalized messages when a step has not been validated. To continue with the same example, it would be interesting to display a pop-up message to tell the user why the step was not validated (lock of hair in front of the face, face not centered…).
4. Provide real-time customer support (chatbot) to answer customer questions.
Real-time assistance is another best practice for better converting your prospects. Beforehand, it’s important to identify the phases in the acquisition funnel where the user most needs human interaction. For example, when a step requires the entry of an item that the user would not necessarily be able to find. A chatbot (100% or 50% automatic) can then be a solution for quickly answering customers’ questions.
5. Limit actions allowing the user to leave the onboarding funnel.
You’re probably all familiar with the signposted route of the famous Swedish retailer Ikéa. Its aim: to keep the customer as long as possible in the sales process (also known as customer retention). The same applies to customer onboarding: the more linear and compartmentalized your customer journey, the less likely you are to lose customers along the way. Asking users to check their e-mail address is risky, since it takes them out of the onboarding funnel and into their inbox. It is therefore preferable to limit the number of actions that allow the user to exit the funnel.
6. Gather customer feedback on their experience throughout the onboarding process.
Who better to assess the quality of your customer journey than your customers themselves? Gathering their opinions through qualitative tests is therefore a highly recommended practice. To do this, you can integrate the satisfaction indicator (NPS – Net Promoter Score) at the end of your customer onboarding or at the end of your first welcome e-mail. According to international strategy consulting firm McKinsey, every increase in customer onboarding NPS from 1 to 10 points (out of 100) would lead to a 3% increase in sales generated by the offer.
7. Optimize the process for mobile devices to enable customers to register from any device.
Optimizing your onboarding process for mobile devices is essential today. More and more customers are using their smartphones to register or buy online. It’s therefore important to make your customer journey accessible from any device by making it 100% responsible (adaptable to all screens) or by developing a dedicated application.
8. Use an AI-based solution to automate, speed up and secure the KYC verification process.
KYC (Know Your Customer) is a mandatory process for regulated companies such as banks, insurance companies and fintechs. In order to comply with the 5th LCB-FT Directive, these companies must integrate strict customer knowledge solutions (PVID, Qualified Electronic Signature, etc.), making the process more time-consuming. Tools developed with AI technologies (remote identity verification, automatic checking of supporting documents, eIDAS electronic signature…) like the solutions offered by Netheos, enable you to automate and accelerate the process, greatly improving the consumer experience.
solutions offered by Netheos enable you to automate and accelerate the process, greatly improving the consumer experience.
. What’s more, these technologies enable you to reduce human error and increase the security of your data.
9. Use marketing automation to send personalized emails to users who have not completed their onboarding process.
There are several reasons why a user may not have completed the remote subscription process. If so, it’s important not to lose touch with them. To do this, you can send them personalized emails to remind them of the benefits of your product/service, or to find out why they’re dropping out, to help them complete their journey.
BONUS
10. Perform A/B tests to optimize onboarding processes.
A/B testing consists of simultaneously testing 2 versions of the same device (the onboarding process, for example) to see which performs better. Note that these are randomly proposed to your users. Analysis of the A and B variations also enables you to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the course.
Find out more:
- Banking: use cases to simplify customer onboarding
