Online banking quickly became revolutionary once most leading companies in the field acknowledged that it was no longer required visiting physical locations and standing in long queues to access banking services.
While customers quickly started to prefer a digital banking experience the current pandemic has made remote interactions inevitable. According to Statista, 64.6% of Americans used digital banking in 2021.
In fact, 80% of customers in a Consumer Affairs survey said they would rather do their baking task online than visit a physical branch. Digital experience is a key factor when it comes to choosing a bank.
Online and mobile banking are identified by 82 percent of bank clients as one of the main reasons they chose their current bank.
When interacting with a bank or registering to a banking service, the intake phase is one of the most tedious and time-consuming processes both for Relationship Managers and potential clients.
However, onboarding remains a deciding factor for nearly two-thirds of clients when it comes to picking a company.
And because of the COVID-19, transitioning to online customer service has become a necessity for banking businesses.
It is high-time when banks need to improve a key aspect of their banking business– the customer onboarding process
Having helped hundreds of financial services with their digital onboarding, we understand the needs and expectations of a customer when they onboard a company.
In this guide, we will discuss how financial institutions can redefine their customer onboarding process and how Clustdoc can help them make the transition without any trouble.
Research shows 4 out of 10 customers abandon the bank onboarding process. The reason behind this is lengthy and time-consuming paperwork which often asks too many personal questions.
It’s not a shocking revelation, customers today want speedy and frictionless service. Traditional onboarding is time-consuming, cumbersome, and outdated and hence it fails to put a good impression on the banking customers.
The paperwork-centric onboarding process is a liability for your company. Digitally transforming your onboarding system to make it customer-centric should be on the top of your priority list.
Below are a few reasons why customer onboarding is the reason why financial companies is losing customers.
A Forrester study shows that onboarding can cost up to $25,000 per client with an average cost of $6,000 per client. This study surveyed financial institutions that offer customer, commercial, and investment services.
Filling out a single paper document may cost you $20, while mistakes and misfiled paperwork can lose you $125 in productivity.
To manage all of this paperwork, you’ll need to hire an additional employee for every 12 file cabinets. With all of these expenses, paperwork becomes a significant liability for your banking business.
A Gartner study shows that an average manager waits four weeks every year to receive documents.
This means that your company loses another $4500 per year searching and waiting for misplaced and lost documents.
While two-thirds of office workers spend one hour every day searching for documents.
Now, imagine the amount of paperwork in your business. You might be losing millions of dollars right now while waiting for paperwork to reach managers’ desks.
The same Forrester study shows that financial institutions call clients up to 10 times requesting to submit files.
Clients are requested to submit documents between 5 and 100. Imagine the time lost in this process.
10 out of 13 organizations in the research accepted that they have lost customers to time-consuming and inefficient onboarding processes.
For many clients, onboarding is crucial. Registration and login are the single most important concern for 26% of clients when choosing a bank.
A Medallia research says 35% of bank customers share a negative experience with their banks with friends, family, and colleagues.
The hard work you put in to impress your clients will be undone with one negative experience.
And if the friction occurs right at the start of your relationship, it’s hard to come back.
In the banking business, having an efficient onboarding process that engages consumers and builds a positive relationship is critical. If you understand how to onboard a new customer into your company, you can design an engaging digital onboarding process.
How to Provide a Seamless Onboarding Experience to Your Clients?
Here are a few tips to keep in mind to ensure your onboarding process is smooth and customer-friendly:The first step in onboarding your customers the right way is understanding what your customers need during the process.
You can do this by gathering and analyzing customer data and through customer interactions.
This information lets you see common trends and patterns regarding user behavior and usage.
You can then use this data to segment your customer and create a client onboarding process that provides a positive experience.
Millennial customers today want to complete all their banking activities right from their computer or phone.
An online application to onboard your customers can make the entire customer journey simpler and smoother than traditional onboarding.
Your onboarding needs preparation. When you onboard a new client, you want to ensure you collect all the documents needed and guide them through your company’s processes and policies.
A client has to submit personal information, employment details, tax records, and other relevant verification papers to verify themselves. Collecting all of this paperwork may be time consuming, and if you forget to collect a necessary document, you may have to wait another couple of days.
A step-by-step checklist ensures you never miss any key detail and comply with legal regulations.
When a new customer enters your company, they can have difficulty understanding your financial services. An efficient digital onboarding practice effectively communicates your services and policies to your clients.
Your consumers should find all the details they require on the onboarding platform itself. An online client portal makes help more accessible to the clients whenever they need it. You can streamline your onboarding interaction and guide your customers with ease.
A study by Statista shows that 42% prefer self-directed and independent learning over a hands-on approach. Hence, you should make sure that your onboarding process is flexible for both types of customers.
You have so many things to do while onboarding a new bank client. With so many tasks like sending emails, requesting documents for KYC, and other administrative tasks, the onboarding process might end up being lengthy.
Streamline your customer onboarding by automating repetitive and menial tasks. This way, you are free to focus more on improving your strategies and building better relationships with your customers.
Some tasks you can consider automating are:
Each new customer has a preference of their own when it comes to what services they like. If you can provide a personalized experience to your customers and meet their needs, you can earn their trust and loyalty.
You need to provide different onboarding depending on customers’ needs and expectations. Your clients and business clients both have different onboarding needs and the documents they have to share are also different.
During the onboarding, you can send personalized welcome emails, tutorials, and brief tours to your customers.
Personalization also includes how you interact or reach out to your customers. Address them by their names in emails or chats. Acknowledge their concerns (if they ever have one) as soon as possible through live chats.
Clustdoc is a solution you can use to onboard your clients with ease. Its customer portal helps you welcome your new clients. It even offers a mobile app for better accessibility.
Clustdoc provides a comprehensive, robust, and engaging onboarding solution. It will let you swiftly verify customer identification and onboard them so that you can provide customer satisfaction and minimize the risk of identity fraud.
With Clustdoc’s advanced features, you can quickly and easily obtain the information you need from clients and provide them with an uninterrupted onboarding experience.
With Clustdoc, you can collect and move forward customers’ applications quicker than ever before. Your current account opening system will be thorough, structured, and well-integrated.
I’ve listed some unique Clustdoc features for customer onboarding in your banking business.
You no longer have to hand over a huge pile of paperwork or use emails and spreadsheets to onboard clients with eternity of waiting for documents to arrive.
The exciting part is your clients can now fill forms in the onboarding checklist online interactively with speed and accuracy.
Using the form builder tool, Clustdoc makes it simple to collect personal and financial information from customers. With Clustdoc, your clients can conveniently submit their information from their phones or computers without any hassle.
The online form builder feature on the Clustdoc bank onboarding checklist is the easiest way to create interactive forms to collect customer information.
Depending on document requirements, you can include a variety of different items in your checklist.
One of the highlighted features of Clustdoc’s checklist is the automated file request feature.
With Clustdoc’s automated file request, you can quickly request clients to share the list of documents you need to collect from them. They can submit the files easily on the platform in their own time. And Clustdoc saves their information for their next visit.
You can easily request a list of files or documents, or share your own.
With Clustdoc’s client messaging, you can send and receive messages to/from recipients and other bank staff on the same platform.
Once your clients submit their documents, you can review the files Clustdoc has organized for you and approve or deny them easily.
Using Clustdoc’s Reminder feature, you can schedule and customize automated emails and SMS follow-ups for the pending documents.
Our checklist application will send file received notifications, reminders and keep track of the document submission for you.
You don’t have to call or email the clients to notify them about wrong file submission or pending documents like you had to do without Clustdoc.
After the customer submits their documents, the platform saves them in a unique folder on the cloud.
Your bank staff can find these documents easily on our client portal. Your team can review their information very quickly from the business console.
When you need the client documents, you can quickly locate them. You will no longer lose a client record amid your cabinet’s stack of papers.
Clustdoc also has a mobile application so that your clients can comfortably and remotely fill their information from anywhere in the world.
Previously, you had to print legal documents, get them signed, and then copy or scan them. The e-signature function in Clustdoc allows you to sign verification certification within minutes.
You can obtain legally binding e-signatures using Clustdoc instead of printing, signing, and scanning documents.
For clients to share their sensitive personal information, your onboarding process should make them feel comfortable in terms of security. Clustdoc complies with security regulations and prioritizes client data safety.
Clustdoc checklists are compliant with GDPR security measures. Clustdoc follows the rules that the regulation defines to ensure that the company complies with them.
Clustdoc checklist enhances both the security and accountability of your data and transactions.
Clustdoc offers a variety of checklists that you can use straight away in your banking business and provide an exceptional customer experience to your clients.
Clustdoc has ready-made templates like KYC onboarding, current accounting onboarding, and more. You can use these pre-made checklists and share them or tweak them according to your needs.
These ready-to-publish checklists will make your job easy and stress-free.
Clustdoc offers a variety of checklists that you can use straight away in your banking business and provide an exceptional customer experience to your clients.
Clustdoc has ready-made templates like KYC onboarding, current accounting onboarding, and more. You can use these pre-made checklists and share them or tweak them according to your needs.
These ready-to-publish checklists will make your job easy and stress-free.
Time is the most valuable asset for your commercial customers. They don’t want to spend days trying to open a bank account and start their business transactions.
You must design a straightforward and automated commercial customer onboarding process to make this step the most convenient experience for your business clients.
You will save a lot of time and resources on request processing by automating the process using Clustdoc.
With Clustdoc’s advanced features, you can quickly and easily obtain the data you need from customers to set up their accounts.
The race among financial institutions to become digital companies is well-known. Why then in the era of tap-to-pay, should you stick to the centuries-old paper-based onboarding process.
Customers now expect speedy, easy, and convenient onboarding. With Clustdoc, you can achieve more with less effort by developing a completely paperless and automated onboarding process. Even contract signing is handled digitally with the e-signature function.
It is time to take away the papers, emails, and attachments from your bank onboarding process with Clustdoc.
Clustdoc is a client onboarding orchestration platform used by modern teams around the world. With Clustdoc, you can run automated workflows for requesting, reviewing and verifying new customers’ data, documents and contracts – without juggling between tools.
If your team is managing new customers using emails, spreadsheets and PDFs, you’ll probably love using Clustdoc.
