How to Build a Fast and Frictionless Digital Customer Onboarding Experience

If a person has seven seconds to make a good first impression, a business has half that. In a short amount of time, businesses need to impress their potential users and ensure those users stick with the digital platform or service before moving on. 

One way to do that? Provide a frictionless digital customer onboarding experience.

Digital customer onboarding involves remotely integrating new customers while using a suite of technologies to simplify and speed up the process. Here’s how to build an onboarding process for your company that draws more customers rather than pushing them away.

Principles of frictionless digital onboarding

Digital onboarding takes place in several stages, all of which impact the overall customer experience: 

• Sign-up: At this early stage of the customer onboarding process, new users provide basic information about themselves. Registration should be fast and straightforward. 
• Verification: While optional, specialized verification software confirms the new customer’s identity. This should be entirely automated to ensure a seamless customer experience.
• Validation: Another optional step, AI-driven scanning tools help customers upload and validate their required documents, minimizing the number of steps necessary and providing real-time feedback for a more frictionless customer onboarding experience.
• Account setup: Users complete their account setup and start using the product or service. Once finished, users will be seamlessly guided through the process and fully onboarded. 

Research has found that 7 in 10 customers will switch to a competitor if they feel the onboarding process is too complicated, so businesses need to prioritize simplicity and speed. Automation greatly assists both outcomes.

Leveraging technology for a seamless onboarding process

Speaking of simplicity and automation, modern technologies enable companies to design a frictionless customer onboarding process with minimal hassle. 

This is particularly useful for banks, financial institutions, and general businesses that handle sensitive information and need to comply with a wide range of regulations.

AI, machine learning, and pre-programmed algorithms help reduce human error, cut costs, and improve efficiency at various customer touch points, ultimately contributing to business growth. 

Microblink’s solutions for frictionless onboarding

Companies like Microblink drive innovation in digital onboarding. Microblink’s SDK uses advanced technology to extract and verify documents’ authenticity while ensuring compliance with regulations and top-notch security. 

Here are two notable examples of frictionless customer onboarding streamlined by Microblink:

• During the coronavirus pandemic, healthcare provider Omnicare Medical Center experienced issues in onboarding its patients, who were stuck filling out forms by hand. After implementing Microblink, Omnicare increased its daily patient testing capacity by a whopping 2,810%.
• KEKS Pay—a simple mobile app that lets users send and receive money quickly—struggled to speed up the process of adding credit cards. However, integrating Microblink’s credit card scanning solution, BlinkCard, solved the challenge. In the first month of activation, KEKS Pay even saw an 11% increase in card activation rates and a 26% decrease in unsuccessful attempts to add a new credit card.

Best practices for implementing frictionless onboarding

To ensure frictionless digital customer onboarding, it’s important to remember that customer acquisition isn’t just about attracting new customers—it’s also about keeping them engaged. 

One of the best ways to keep a customer engaged is through interactive and intuitive user interface (UI) design.

As a guiding UI principle for onboarding, all interactions need to be simplified, and the elements users interact with must be organized intuitively and hierarchically. In addition, data security and privacy protection mechanisms need to be integrated into the digital customer onboarding process to maintain compliance. 

The impact of frictionless onboarding on business success

Virtually all available data suggests that the modern customer demands frictionless experiences:

• One study found that nearly 70 percent of customers are willing to pay more for a product if a company has excellent customer service. 
• Another study shows that 77% of customers will likely recommend a brand to a friend after a positive experience.
• Businesses that prioritize frictionless experiences also see a 1.6x increase in customer lifetime value and a 1.4x boost in revenue compared to those that do not.

The bottom line is that companies will find correlations between onboarding efficiency, conversion, and retention rates.

Future trends in digital onboarding

Companies that identify opportunities early on have a greater chance of gaining a competitive advantage and achieving sustainable growth. Emerging technologies like biometrics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence will play a central role in streamlining onboarding for years to come.

Securing a frictionless experience should be a top priority for companies seeking to stand out among competitors, and adopting these emerging technologies via the right partnerships becomes crucial for doing so.

Minimize onboarding friction with Microblink

Fast and frictionless digital customer onboarding is the future. Businesses that fail to internalize this fact risk losing potential customers to competitors who offer smoother and more efficient services.

However, companies that are aware of and capitalize on the latest trends in customer acquisition and onboarding will have a major competitive edge when prioritizing user experiences.

Microblink scans 95 documents every second and verifies around three billion IDs per year. Its SDK elevates your business to new heights while helping you stay compliant with KYC, AML, and age verification requirements and protecting your customers’ data. Contact our experts to find out more.