3 Customer Onboarding Conversion Killers and how to avoid them

How can you ensure that your prospective customer completes the onboarding process and that your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) and bounce rate become lower than the industry average? Two key questions to which we give you the answers below. 

The Onboarding process is the key element to forming a relationship between customers and financial institutions. It is the first impression a prospect gets from your business. Those who fail to make a convincing first impression will later miss out on valuable sales in a market that is being tackled by more and more digital champions. The digital battle for the customer has long since ceased to be focused on Gen Y alone.

The customer onboarding challenge

How can traditional financial institutions succeed when they have a wide customer spectrum which has different interests and focuses? How do you convince a diversified customer group to finish the onboarding process without having to sacrifice modern features and established processes?

Customer onboarding conversion killers:

1. A bad onboarding design

A key feature in the design of an onboarding process is that almost all departments are involved in this topic. It is not uncommon for data protection officers, compliance, marketing, product managers, and, of course, sales or customer service to sit around the same table and jointly create the process for onboarding. Fear of not complying with the numerous legal requirements and the intention to meet the needs of every department often result in questionnaires that focus on completeness rather than user-friendliness. However, in the end, the customer does not appreciate the accuracy but is grateful for a user-friendly experience and every minute saved. It's not uncommon for financial institutions to undercut each other at this point with the leanest onboarding process; closing times of under 7-minutes have long been the benchmark.

The Onboarding Questionnaire

30 mandatory fields on one page are daunting and lead to not initiating the process in the first place. Before you start designing the questionnaire, ask yourself internally:

1. Which questions are really necessary and regulatory mandatory within onboarding?
2. Which questions can we also ask at a later date?

Once you have this list, divide the questions into blocks and only show as many as are needed for that block at a time. A display about the status of the process conveys confidence and transparently shows how much patience your customer still needs to exercise.

"Many financial institutions overlay their onboarding process with countless 'non-regulatory' mandatory questions for fear of not meeting regulatory requirements," states Paul Kammerer, CCO of Fincite, who has already optimized several onboarding processes of international financial institutions. He also notes that by cleverly timing questions, conversion can be significantly increased without violating regulatory requirements. 

Start with no-brainer questions, i.e., contact information that doesn't require your customer to think long or have documents ready. In subsequent blocks, slowly increase the complexity.

Prospects for success: demonstrably up to 40% higher completion rate!

2. Retarget your customers

Nothing is as expensive as a lost customer. Have you already implemented the recommendations of the first conversion killer? Nevertheless, you are not satisfied with the completion figures of your onboarding? The dropout is not necessarily due to your questionnaire. Maybe your customer had to go to the next appointment, the child had to go to training, maybe the bus came or the cell phone rang. Don't give up now! Because if you have already saved the most important contact data in compliance with data protection regulations, you can easily build retargeting groups and address them again with multi-channel campaigns.

Prospect of success: closing rate is twice as high compared to cold acquired customers!

3. "Happy Moments" for prospects - Create happy customers who are not yet customers!

How would you decide?

1. You go through a questionnaire that takes more than ten minutes to give you the certainty that the time already invested was not wasted.
2. You go through a process that welcomes you after only two minutes, just after entering your contact and login details.

Although you cannot make any transfers or transactions yet, you already get a feel for what it's like to be this company's customer. The master data is stored and elaborate information (such as tax ID number) can be added later.

So, make sure you have many Happy Moments along a regulated process. Motivate and praise your customers and ensure the goal is always within reach. 

How satisfied are you with your onboarding? Are there any conversion killers in your onboarding process? Feel free to contact us, our onboarding experts look forward to hearing from you!