Does your customer experience suffer because you do not offer enough interaction choices?

Businesses today need to be mobile enabled because their customer experience depends on it. As computing enters the mobile age, customers expect the world around them to be compatible with the mobile devices they carry. If you are a sales or marketing leader at a financial institution you have probably recognized that by now. Today almost all banks offer mobile apps for their customers yet they do not offer mobile customer onboarding. Many financial institutions still rely on pen and paper forms that take weeks to process. It is time for financial institutions to think about automating their onboarding process to offer more choices, including mobile, for their customers.

The irony of this situation is that often the onboarding processes is extremely outdated when compared to the service being sold. This soils customer expectations before they even start using your product or service. Imagine that you download a smart phone app for a prominent social networking site. But before you can use the app, you are forced to sign up on their website. When you go to sign up on it doesn’t load properly on your mobile phone; the text is too tiny to read, and the buttons don’t quite work.

What would your expectations for that mobile app be? Low. The same goes for a customer signing up for a new online merchant account using a paper application. You can almost hear your customers think “really… I need to find a fax machine?” as they print their application out to sign and send in.

Cater to the customer, offer more interaction choices

Instead imagine an onboarding experience that delights the customer with more interaction choices. They can access their application through mobile devices so the customers can sign up wherever they are, and it works on their desktop so they can use their keyboard if they prefer. Information is gathered immediately when they decide to apply and is processed in real-time, not several days later. They fill out the minimum number of required fields, and can provide optional information if they wish. They are provided instant feedback if they fill the form out incorrectly, so they can complete it in one sitting. The process is fast and streamlined. Their authorization is completed within minutes, if not seconds.

But this isn’t the case for most customers. Until recently financial institutions have gotten by with pen-and-paper onboarding, but pen-and-paper no longer meets customer expectations. An Oliver Wyman Group study reported that 68% of corporations would switch to a different bank if they offered a better customer onboarding experience and account maintenance. As the financial services industry becomes more competitive, customer experience is becoming very important. A poor onboarding process is transparent for the world to see, and will dissuade current and future customers from signing up.

If you are a decisions maker at a financial institution you need to make improving customer experience a top priority to avoid losing customers. An important factor of customer experience is the customer onboarding process. Don’t let a slow and outdated customer onboarding lead to a bad first impression, deliver great customer experiences from day one with a competent mobile experience.