Onboarding: The Make-or-Break Phase Of The Retail Banking Customer Experience

During his introduction to the “Set the right tone with a seamless customer onboarding” session at OpenText’s Rethink Experiences for Retail Banking, prominent thought leader Jim Marous offered a straightforward notion of wisdom: "If you let go of the [onboarding process], you let go of the biggest opportunity to build the relationship."

Far too many retail banking organizations are, unfortunately, missing this crucial opportunity. After working tirelessly to attract consumer and business clients in today’s hypercompetitive landscape, they squander the first major chance to turn these new accounts into passionately loyal supporters. They do not make these new or cross-sold customers feel valued and, in turn, risk lowering their potential lifetime value.

According to Marous, new research confirms that about 50% of institutions say they engage in customer onboarding. The statistic is already underwhelming, and it is even more disappointing when one considers that many of these companies are only engaging in superficial onboarding. They may offer a one-time thank you to their new customers or digitize the records of existing ones, but they are not doing everything they can to demonstrate that the relationship will be built on trust, empathy, seamlessness, and personalized value. They are not using onboarding as an introductory pathway to more valuable, more meaningful future experiences.

Although some companies simply do not appreciate the importance of customer onboarding, most are not short on interest. These companies, instead, face three operational shortcomings:

1. A lack of data
2. A lack of a person or department owning the onboarding process
3. A lack of understanding about how to do onboarding

Given that today’s consumers expect you, as Marous notes, to “know them, understand them, and reward them in such a way that is personal, contextual, and impactful,” it is easy to see why onboarding is so essential. And it is easy to see why these three shortcomings make onboarding particularly challenging for today’s retail banking.

“Set the right tone with a seamless customer onboarding” aimed to address this challenge by sharing a more productive, customer-centric framework for onboarding. By helping companies understand and empathize with their new or re-committed customers -- who they are, why they purchased, signed-up or otherwise-connected, how they feel, what they prefer, what they will want moving forward -- companies can tailor initial messaging, welcome processes, and early promotional offers to their immediate needs. All will simultaneously strengthen customer relationships and improve conversion rates for new, often lucrative activities.

Not simply about making it easy for banks to develop robust onboarding experiences, this process also entails making it easy for customers to engage in next steps.

The onboarding process cannot be as (let alone more) difficult as the initial sign-up process. After all, customers have already exerted effort in the era of convenience. That effort, moreover, involved sharing personal details about themselves -- the kind of personal details that companies should be using to streamline and personalize future interactions. If subsequent experiences involve the customer either repeating information or settling for generic, superficial communication, it sends the message that the sign-up and data acquisition phase was for naught. It sends the message that that company does not value the customer or their time.

In offering potential best practices OpenText VP of Product Management Guy Hellier advises companies to consider the overall journey: from sign-up to onboarding, and then onboarding to future interactions. He also urges companies to consider what data they will need to collect, as it is up to the company -- not the customer -- to determine what will be useful in tailoring future interactions.

From there, the company should start to devise successful onboarding communication. It should also focus on the customer education piece, as all customers should know what steps they have completed in the journey and what the implication of that effort will be. Such communication and education will be of the omnichannel and bidirectional variety, ensuring customers can access the key information and offers, and seek additional support, on their preferred devices.

Along with further emphasizing the need for journey mapping, OpenText Director of Value Engineering Michael Monette advised viewers to implement reliable, proven tools for supporting their process. Customer relationship-building, including onboarding, hinges on a smooth stream of data from acquisition point to millions of communication touch points. Any break in analytics or service delivery technology will all-at-once make interactions less personal, less structured, and less efficient. Customer satisfaction will fall as costs rise.

Beyond facilitating the message creation, modern technology helps companies understand whether its messages are being received and, more importantly, driving action. By examining these insights, companies can reconfigure their processes and refine their messages to ensure they are not only reaching all customers but doing so with the most actionable, loyalty-generating messaging possible.

Because they shorten delivery time and improve scalability, digital channels have made this analysis and refinement process much easier. But, as Marous notes, they have also elevated the standard for customer onboarding. As vessels for real-time (or near-real-time), account-specific communication, digital environments introduce an expectation for more contextual, personal, and actionable messaging. Generic “thank you for your business” sentiment might have once worked on postcards, but it has no place in the world of instant, SMS, chat, or email-based communication.

Automation, of course, empowers this process by guiding companies (if not outright delivering) on immediate, highly contextual onboarding efforts.

To hear more of the seamless onboarding conversation, or to engage with the other insightful retail banking sessions, click here for free, on-demand access to the Rethink Retail Banking Experiences virtual summit.