Revolutionising customer onboarding: A deep dive into UX research & design

How much thought do you dedicate to customer onboarding? It might not always be at the forefront of your mind, but it plays a pivotal role in the customer journey, providing substantial influence on customer satisfaction, organizational reputation and brand loyalty.

Let’s explore the intricacies of customer onboarding, including what it entails, its significance, operational mechanisms and the mutual benefits it brings.

Understanding customer onboarding

The term ‘customer onboarding’ can be subject to misinterpretation. In essence, it refers to the process of transitioning a new prospect into a new customer within your organization. Also known as customer registration or sign-up, this area is ripe for digital transformation, streamlining data gathering and enhancing the reporting process post-client engagement.

At Elixirr, we see customer onboarding as an untapped frontier for innovation, transforming prospects into loyal customers with unparalleled ease and efficiency.

The relevance of onboarding across sectors

While often associated with financial services (particularly banking) due to its intricate nature and stringent checks, customer onboarding transcends sectors. Any industry requiring customers to provide details for sign-up or registration, be it opening a bank account or acquiring a gym membership, necessitates data collection, and therefore a process for customer onboarding. The differentiating factors lie in the types of data and the complexity involved.

Contrary to the notion that onboarding processes are often fixed and unchangeable, our extensive research—most notably in the financial services sector—reveals significant customer pain points. These pain points have the potential to detrimentally impact your customers’ perceptions of your organization right from the start of the relationship.

Unearthing challenges through comprehensive research

Our research methodology encompasses a holistic approach to onboarding, including evaluating current processes, conducting direct customer surveys, interviews, prototyping and user testing. Through these channels, we’ve gained insights into customer opinions and identified common challenges, including:

• Frustrations with data input
• Errors in the data
• Frustration with prolonged process durations

The critical point often overlooked is the profound impact on the initial customer experience and overall impressions. As the first meaningful interaction with the organization for many customers, the onboarding process shapes their expectations and perceptions. Frustration at this stage can set a negative tone for the relationship, influencing customer satisfaction and lifetime value.

Know Your Customer (KYC): Navigating regulatory checks

There are regulatory checks crucial for verifying a customer’s identity which certain sectors are required to complete.  While imperative, these checks often entail complexity, ambiguity in legal structures and room for data entry errors. The process is also often fragmented, manual and time-consuming. As well as for KYC and anti-money laundering (AML) purposes, data also needs to be kept updated and regularly audited for accuracy. Therefore, the process requires a seamless approach to data collection, maintenance and auditing to meet the stringent requirements and for ease of process.

Reshaping the narrative with UX

Contrary to the typical view that processes often have to stay as they are, this usually isn’t the case. The answer often lies in user experience (UX) and customer research. A robust UX approach has the potential to address, if not entirely resolve, these challenges.

UX involves understanding the existing process and user needs. We must identify the challenges, pain points and what users want. It’s then possible to map out the points where the process is failing and the improvements that need to be made. This journey involves conducting:

• Polls
• Surveys
• Expert reviews
• User interviews
• Stakeholder interviews
• User testing
• Biometric testing

The next stage is the solution design and designing a new process that resolves the challenges and delivers the experience that users want. This can involve:

• Wireframing
• User journey mapping
• Prototyping
• User testing
• UX design

The final stage is to build and implement the new, user-centric solution. This can be a complex process, with many integrations and requirements, as well as time-consuming and costly. However, there are alternative solutions.

Our game-changing onboarding platform

Leveraging our extensive research and expertise, we’ve developed a fully customisable, flexible and integrated API-led solution designed to seamlessly integrate with existing systems.

This platform offers a transformative onboarding experience, usually in conjunction with other UX elements or UX research. The platform can be configured to meet your specific requirements, while offering a best-in-class user experience.

Some of its benefits include:

• Fully configurable with logic flows
• Increased data accuracy, i.e. fewer mistakes
• More automation, i.e. less manual processing
• Seamless integration with:
  • Virtually any database in the world, such as Dunn & Bradstreet
  • Third-party verification tools, such as ID Now
  • Almost any other API system
• Better audit logging and compliance
• Improved security
• Reduced onboarding time
• Better user experience and customer satisfaction

Integration flexibility is the core of our approach

If you already have an existing platform, then ours can be combined with it. It can either function independently or integrate with your current setup. This involves identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies for improvement. Whether enhancing existing systems, providing a new platform, or creating a hybrid solution, flexibility is at the core of our approach and creating the ideal solution.

We have implemented this process for global clients and international banks. Illustrating the impact of our solution, consider a client that had challenges with prolonged onboarding times for new corporate clients—up to three months in some instances. Implementing our onboarding platform dramatically reduced the onboarding time to as little as two days in some cases, significantly enhancing the customer experience and overall satisfaction.

Embracing technological advancements for the future of onboarding

The future of onboarding is here and we’re leading the charge, embracing tech advancements to redefine the onboarding experience.

As technology advances and customer expectations grow, delivering a seamless customer experience becomes imperative. What’s more, operations and compliance teams have bloated significantly in the last 10 years as a consequence of increased regulation. This means that streamlining outdated systems and fortifying data management will take center stage as organizations strive to meet increasing compliance requirements and operational efficiencies. As well as adapting to the evolving digital landscape and growing online threats.

Ready to elevate your onboarding experience?

Whether you’re aiming to enhance existing systems or contemplating a complete overhaul, our expert consultants in UX, onboarding and digital transformation are ready to support you. Begin your journey towards world-class onboarding—connect with us today to explore how we can elevate your customer experience.