Customer onboarding has never been easy, and the requirements and expectations are exceedingly high. As products and services get more specific, customer onboarding becomes more challenging. Organizations that are able to differentiate themselves usually do so by offering a smooth customer experience.
Resolving problems with customer onboarding starts with understanding where the pain points are. The first problem all organizations face is the way customers provide documentation. Some organizations require identity documents to be certified as being a true likeness of the original. This is hugely inefficient and, in most cases, slows down processing times. The second problem is the manual work required to read and evaluate the documents. This inevitably leads to a degree of human error and a delay in identifying problems with the documents, which slows the process even further. Thirdly, information checked by organizations is often never used again. This is a case of customers providing valuable information and many organizations failing to capitalize on the opportunity to use that information to offer them the right product.
Automating Document Processing and Verification
According to the survey conducted by Sapio Research in October 2022 on behalf of ABBYY, among 1,623 IT decision-makers across the U.K., U.S., France, Germany and Japan, “9 out of 10 organizations are experiencing up to 40% abandonment rates at onboarding, and some even more. Another 5% have a complete lack of insight into their onboarding process, abandonment rates and where abandonment is occurring within the process.” The top three causes of individuals dropping out during the onboarding process are 1) There are too many steps to get through (29%), 2) identifying verification/financial documents (26%) and 3) too many manual steps (26%).
The survey shows that ineffective customer onboarding can lose a customer before they even begin using a product or service. If the process isn’t friction-free, the customer may decide the pain of onboarding isn’t worth the marketing promise. Organizations must address customers’ pain points by implementing a mix of human factors and automation.
Intelligent document processing (IDP) provides organizations a way to automate the processing, authentication and verification of documents. It is crucial to transform ineffective customer onboarding processes by leveraging intelligent automation for ID verification, mobile document capture and automated data entry to empower customers to choose any channel they prefer to complete their onboarding.
How IDP Improves Customer Experience
IDP also helps facilitate improved monitoring and evaluation of customer onboarding. Minimizing abandonment rates requires a user-friendly and streamlined process with fewer steps. Human errors can also lead to poor onboarding experiences for customers, as it involves longer processing times and can result in the customer receiving the wrong product or service.
In one financial services firm, the mortgage application process is a 700-page document consisting of various document types including customer ID, photographic ID and proofs of address. The average processing time was between two to three hours. When the company implemented IDP, it used predictive modeling, convolutional neural network and natural language modeling to understand and extract relevant data. The outcome achieved from this process was an 80% increase in accuracy over time and a reduction in manual effort from two to three hours per document to less than 30 minutes.
IDP helps eliminate tedious, manual tasks that slow customer onboarding. Organizations that leverage IDP can process documents by at least 50% faster with fewer errors. This allows employees who carry out the customer onboarding activities to focus on the more complex issues at hand and provide better customer service.
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