Digital Onboarding Trends 2019

TrendsEmphasis on Customer Experience (CX)

Envision the Full Customer Lifecycle

Connect the Disconnected

Foster Digital Empathy

Engage the Virtual Workforce

Enable Multiple Product and Party Onboarding Processes

Automate and Collaborate

Compliance by Design

Transparency and Control

Faster-Than-Ever Technology Deployment

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Top Trends in Digital Onboarding for 2019Throughout our over fifteen years building innovative technology for various companies, we’ve seen just how relevant digital onboarding has become in every industry. Whether it’s a car or bike rental company signing up a new customer, a utilities or life insurance company onboarding a client, a business hiring a new employee, or even a software vendor onboarding a partner to its marketplace, it’s clear that onboarding is becoming an ever-more important focus within a variety of sectors.

Across industries, new technologies are changing the way customers search for and buy goods and services. Physical and digital interactions are gradually beginning to meld together as customers increasingly expect complementary interactions between the two. Since many high-value relationships evolve from low-value transactions, such as onboarding a new client, institutions need to establish excellence from the outset.

In the services industries more than any other, technology is turning services into commodities. In order to remain profitable, brands need to expand their ecosystems and own more of the customer journey by moving into areas way outside of their comfort zones. For example, banks offering mortgages could connect with real estate agencies or utilities providers to offer a comprehensive home buying experience. Companies that create an all-inclusive ecosystem will deliver the most value to customers and maintain a competitive advantage.

Some companies, on the other hand, only need simple onboarding capabilities that focus on real-time product and services availability. Either way, one thing is certain: Onboarding expectations are growing, and businesses should be equipped to handle these expectations.

Read on for the digital onboarding trends that all industries should focus on in 2019.

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Emphasis on Customer Experience (CX)

Companies like Google, Apple, Netflix, and Amazon have raised consumer expectations to the point that CX has become the main point of competitive differentiation in nearly every sector. CX is particularly critical in a service industry where there isn’t a tangible product; it becomes all about the experience you deliver.

Moreover, regulations like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) give clients the power to decide which companies contact them and how they’re contacted. This is why businesses need to improve communication; all touchpoints need to be relevant, timely, contextual, and consistent to avoid clients deleting their data from a company’s records. GDPR forces businesses to put even greater emphasis on CX, as poor experiences could cost them potential opportunities and contact with clients.

We also live in a world where customers are busier than ever, which means it’s essential to eliminate friction across all digital and physical channels throughout the entire customer journey and enable hybrid experiences. Clients will be happy not to deal with time-consuming, non-essential paperwork and have the chance to focus on more valuable and relevant information.

For more information on this topic, read our whitepaper, How to Master Customer Experience Excellence.

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Envision the Full Customer Lifecycle

Customer centricity throughout the client lifecycle is the first element to consider when designing a digital offering, and a 360-degree customer view and beyond should be the foundational aspect. Create this view by aggregating different types of data, starting with demographical information, contact details, and behavioral data, as well as by doing a deeper dive into predictive analytics. Big data is also a useful tool that provides companies with the possibility to further their 360-degree view by obtaining real-time information from different channels, performing customer sentiment analyses based on consumer behavior, and recommending products based on customers’ habits and needs.

While first interactions are a significant driver of client loyalty, customers also expect cohesive experiences across products and services, lines of business, locations, and over time.

For more information on this topic, read our UK Thought Leadership Panel interview.

Attract

Convert

Engage

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Connect the Disconnected

Innovation can’t exist inside isolated silos. By their very nature, disconnected organizational structures prevent links being formed with potential partners, resources, and market insights. Organizations need to focus on streamlining and orchestrating people, systems, and data—both end-to-end and across boundaries— if they want to break down silos and build strong relationships.

Data is becoming the most valued asset for companies, which is why integration becomes all the more critical. Connect the different systems of record and keep data synced and consistent to ensure that meaningful and relevant information is always available. Employees can benefit from data availability and enhance the collaboration between departments, working together effortlessly and generating more value.It’s easy to innovate and not consider how each component connects to one another. For the best long-term outcome, businesses have to keep in mind that the more connected everything is the better.

For more information on this topic, read our whitepaper, How to Engage the Connected Customer.

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Foster Digital Empathy

Digital inputs provide new data in real time, giving businesses the ability to demonstrate empathy toward their customers on a broad scale. It gives them the power to assess a customer’s state of mind in the moment—including emotional, motivational, behavioral, situational, and environmental factors affecting their moods. Incorporating these emotions into responses and finding the most appropriate communication based on a customer’s product ownership, previous transactions, and browsing and mobile activities helps build customer trust, loyalty, and satisfaction while offering lifetime value for companies.

Companies are using smart analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to find out what truly matters to their clients. This allows them to offer customers what they care about on the channels of their choice. For more information about this topic, watch our webinar, Unlock the Potential of Robotic Process Automation.

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Engage the Virtual Workforce

Additionally, we have started to see robots interact with other robots to drive efficiency. Devices and systems powered by Siri and Alexa will talk to business-created bots to solve customer issues, bringing new opportunities for brands to deliver more targeted, personalized, and relevant customer experiences. However, these machines must be tightly coupled with humans in an interconnected ecosystem to guarantee that jobs requiring emotional intelligence, nuanced judgment, and cultural understanding still remain in human control. AI technologies and automated machines can’t replace the human touch—at least not yet.

Chatbots, virtual assistants, robotic automation, robots talking to each other—these will all become more mainstream and will continue to improve productivity and customer satisfaction.

For more information, watch our webinar, How to Harness the Power of Chatbots.

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Enable Multiple Product and Party Onboarding Processes

Many companies still have fragmented processes that prevent a seamless experience and client onboarding is often viewed as a routine process instead of an enormous opportunity to build relationships. Consequently, there’s no focus on efficiency and scaling up—the onboarding process for the clients is constrained by product-based silos and disconnected systems.

Client onboarding requests can come through different channels and involve several e-mails, paper documents, and faxes, as well as frequent manual intervention. For the client, the absence of clear information on the status of their onboarding becomes frustrating. Additionally, the lack of a centralized view of a client can lead to potential fallouts.Make onboarding experiences as convenient as possible, even in more complex scenarios. Onboard a whole family in one single procedure. Include different products and services that might not share the same processes (like checking the eligibility of a more complicated service in detail for an individual person).

For an example of how this can be modelled in banking, read our whitepaper, The Banking Shopping Experience: A New Era.

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Automate and Collaborate

In the near future, all employees will become customer engagement agents, as advances in AI and robotic automation will free up their time to focus on more value-added activities. This will blur the lines between service agents, salespeople, and marketers.

All customer-facing employees will be able to service, sell, or do anything the customer needs in the moment, leveraging automated and frictionless processes. Back office employees will also “upgrade” their job function, focusing more on complex cases and delivering valuable outcomes for customers. The organization will move with the customer, as opposed to the past where the customer had to move across an organization’s siloed departments.

Empower employees to become more customer focused by freeing them up from completing administrative tasks and by encouraging teams to share expertise across departments. Companies should always be nimble and prepare their employees to handle evolving situations.

For more information, read our factsheet Workspace Collaboration.

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Compliance by Design

As we mentioned before, the most essential part of client onboarding is data. Data needs to be captured and has to satisfy regulators’ needs. This is why filling out forms, collecting client signatures, and disclosing all necessary information about the source of funds in a KYC profile is imperative. The flow of data should be controlled and securely stored in the backend system.

Digital transformation is opening up a whole new world of business opportunities, but it’s also creating new risks. Enterprises now urgently need to place an emphasis on cybersecurity, privacy, and data protection if they want to gain customers’ trust and loyalty.

Make your intentions clear by creating comprehensive and modern governance, risk, and compliance models that effectively respond to existing and upcoming compliance requirements, for onboarding and more.

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Transparency and Control

While big data can create great customer insights, there’s also a downside. Digitally, every interaction with a consumer is a conversation. Brands must manage and control those conversations to create engagement and improve the customer experience. Managing privacy and enabling transparency will also help to create trust. For example, banks and mobile operators have tremendous amounts of data, but they can’t let these data sets interact without understanding who will use the data and how it will be used.

GDPR gives Europe-based customers the ability to control how their data is used and who has access to it. This means companies will have to be more transparent about personal data and how they utilize it. Balancing AI’s potential value with its potential risks will be an important priority.

For more information, read our infographic GDPR: 3 Steps Banks Can Take to Leverage the New Law

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Faster-Than-Ever Technology Deployment

Customers today demand a quick and seamless digital experience, and they want it now. It’s not enough to digitalize your existing products and services by just adding more technology. To make digital transformation successful, it’s crucial to get to know current and future customers, empower digital talent, and connect with new partners. Agile organizations can respond quicker and are more adaptable when it comes to customers’ needs, requirements, and changing circumstances. By using the right design system, these companies can implement and maintain superior onboarding experiences that are speedy, take less effort, and offer higher quality.

We’re in the Digital Era, and that means firms have to get up and running quickly. Shift the focus from delivering individual user experience elements to delivering entire experiences that blow customers away.

For more information, read our whitepaper, Design Systems: Scaling Great Design for Today and Tomorrow.

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About Appway

Appway builds software for today and innovates for the technology of the future. With over 15 years of industry experience, Appway guides the leading financial institutions, both big and small, as they build sustainable and scalable solutions that quickly adapt to changing conditions.

Headquartered in Switzerland with offices around the globe, Appway’s awardwinning software suite serves over 420,000 users worldwide. More than 225 institutions rely on Appway to improve internal efficiencies, engage customers across all channels, and keep ahead of regulations.

Get in touch to learn how we can help you bring your onboarding capabilities to the next level: appway.com/contact

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