Published 28 Oct, 2022 6 minutes of reading
Search the term “digital onboarding” today and you’ll get around 292,000 results. The conversations, products, and solutions surrounding digital onboarding are expansive and often overwhelming.
Now, while digital onboarding information today focuses heavily on the solution side of the equation, what about the core issues and problems that these solutions are solving? What is the intent behind the search for a solution? What is the scope of issues you’re trying to solve for?
In order to stand and talk on common ground, let’s answer a simpler question.
What is digital onboarding?
Digital Onboarding is a process that begins the moment an unknown visitor interacts with your company through one of your digital channels and finalizes when that visitor becomes a known customer who is now enabled to use your products and services.
This short video explains in more detail:
The quest for “complete” digital onboarding solutions
Simply put, what are generally described as Digital Onboarding Solutions, really are just a small part of the formula.
Many of the so-called “complete digital onboarding solutions” are really only capable of solving part of the challenges that institutions face today. Take, for instance, products and services focused on identity validation, which may solve validation requirements via knowledge-based questions, data verification, biometrics, digital footprint, or other means. It’s common to see these products and services being called "complete" onboarding solutions. And although they resolve one of the biggest challenges with onboarding clients remotely, they don’t represent complete solutions.
All of these advancements sound great! Yet, I believe it is rather it’s misleading to label these solutions as “complete” digital onboarding solutions. Especially, for highly regulated industries such as the Financial Industry.
The upside and downside to no-code and low-code
The clear advantage of creating forms and flows with no-code solutions is the value gained through saving time and engineering resources. This approach, though, comes with a significant downside.
The downside of using a no-code or low-code approach is the lack of control you have over the customer experience. This is because you limit your capacity to personalize the UX and UI with these types of solutions. To be literal, you sacrifice opportunities for branding, opportunities to educate your customer, and you sacrifice the opportunity to personalize your onboarding to the point where you can offer a unified client experience across your channels. Let’s assume you don’t want that. Now, there’s a new issue to address.
The user experience problem
A financial institution that wants to provide a unified customer experience will have to set aside much of the upfront experience offered by an onboarding provider, roll up its sleeves, and build its own front. This will include a layer for communication with the different services provided by the onboarding provider, likely consulting their services not in a single hit but rather at different times, when needed as per their desired user experience.
Now, delivering truly customized digital onboarding to your clients is the correct move for any financial institution. The problem now is that the correct approach pretty much kills most of the benefits given by these low-code providers, and we’re back to square one.
The remaining benefit from commercial and administrative perspectives is dealing with a single provider for many solutions rather than the complex many-to-many alternative. This, of course, comes with a downside of increased risk in case things start to not work so well with the chosen provider.
Think like your customer
The point of building a digital onboarding is to bring more customers into your business and to sell and upsell more products and services. That is to say, digital onboarding when thought of as a single experience is just one among many experiences that any modern financial institution is concentrating on in order to win more customers.
The onboarding process itself is an obstacle standing between the client and the product. Be real and be honest.
The main reason for non-completion on the part of a customer is not a lack of compliance. It’s abandonment. Customers leave because of friction within the process itself. We need to think about customer origination as more of an experienced challenge and not just a regulatory and security challenge.
The Modyo approach
The Modyo platform is not an onboarding solution. Modyo is a composable platform to build and deliver experience solutions. And given that the problem to solve is onboarding more customers, and making them fall in love with the relationship they’re starting with your financial institution, customer experiences need to be at the forefront of your objectives and strategy. Radical empathy for how they’re interacting within your digital channels needs to be core to your decision-making.
We believe that part of making customers love your products is making customers love interacting with you. So whenever possible, it has to always feel intimate and personal. You have to avoid making customers feel like they’re constantly being referred somewhere else, to a different window, a different frame, a different context, again and again. A disjointed set of functions that complete a customer’s “set up” is widely ignorant to the experience itself, which becomes disconcerting and disconnecting.
Furthermore, given that digital onboarding is in large part a compliance and security exercise, we believe in a “ownership” approach, by providing our client organizations with the freedom to select best-of-breed technologies. The Modyo platform is the orchestrator that simplifies implementation complexity, ensures institution compliance, and helps customers fall in love with your products and services.
To that end, Modyo is a pro-code experience solution that accompanies financial institutions in creating their own integrated onboarding solutions by expressing the best of each key element necessary to continuously deliver great experiences.
What is an integrated onboarding solution?
Many so-called onboarding solutions out there comprise only a few parts of a complete onboarding solution. This is because of a lack of scope and perspective. Onboarding begins with the customer engagement we capture from a public site, or with the leads invited to participate through targeted notifications, and ends with customers understanding and making successful use of their purchased products and services. That’s the end-to-end experience
The challenge for FI Product Owners
When looking for onboarding solutions, financial institution product owners are generally very focused on looking for solutions that help respond to compliance requirements, but fail to see the entire picture in terms of the integrated experience, the impact on channels and the need for evolving this ever-changing experience as bad actors in the space become more creative, compliance requirements more strict, and technology and user needs evolve. We may then think about challenging them about how well the chosen tools resolve their business needs:
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Are your customers having a seamless unified experience while navigating your public site, the client onboarding, and the private site? Are they loving their experience?
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Are you able to measure organic traffic? What is the path most users are taking to generate their application?
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Are you able to send out targeted invitations to users who began and then abandoned an onboarding process in order to improve your completion rate?
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Are you measuring user satisfaction with the onboarding experience?
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Do your onboarding agents have access to all the information they need in a single platform?
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Are you able to detect the points of highest friction and quickly refocus development without impacting the entire solution?
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Are you able to evolve your digital onboarding solution with multiple teams working in parallel without impacting one another?
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Are you able to manage all this from a single tool?
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Are you able to swap your development team and external services at any time and continue operating and evolving with ease your onboarding solution?
Build a better onboarding solution
Think about any of the questions above. If you don’t have a solid answer to one or more of them or are just simply not sure, then you should reach out to us.
We’re in the business of helping organizations like yours build better digital products through our composable front end platform. You’ve got challenges to face and problems to solve, and today we deliver solutions for companies like yours across use cases in digital onboarding, transactional websites, public site experiences, and so much more.
Building the front end of your digital channels on the Modyo platform sets you up to accelerate how you deliver digital products and client experiences. It future-proofs your digital channels as you shift to using better processes and tools that allow you to evolve your products over time and adapt to your markets. And most importantly, harnessing the Modyo platform is an investment in the long-term growth of your digital ecosystem as you’re able to work with flexibility and agility across technology providers that help you deliver more value to your digital channels and client experiences.
Your digital onboarding solution can be better, so let’s talk about what challenges you’re facing, and get you started on building the right solution.
