Digital customer onboarding journeys

What challenges does onboarding present?

When it comes to customer journey orchestration, it is critical to optimise conversion. This involves removing all friction, anything that might slow down or get in the way of journey completion. However, onboarding journeys often aim to introduce friction, acting as a barrier that only lets certain applicants through.

Digital onboarding journeys must be able to deal with complexity and diversity among applicants.  Oversimplifying leads to a poor understanding of their circumstances.  However, complexity increases friction.  So, the challenge for onboarding is to accept the complexities, adequately explore them, but always minimise the inevitable friction it creates.

Today, most onboarding processes treat everyone largely the same.  They are prescriptive, ask the same questions and request the same data. They are predefined and inflexible.  Making changes to them is usually slow and costly.  Business understanding and innovation goes far faster than technology’s capability to adapt to it.

What does good onboarding look like?

Good onboarding is flexible in terms of how it engages with the customer, in its questioning, decisioning and in its outcomes.  Flexible in terms of how it can be adapted, and who adapts it.

It understands that every applicant is different and complex.  It only asks relevant questions to get the right information required for each individual.  It knows when digital interaction is appropriate, and when to get a real person involved.  It is as long as it needs to be, but as short as it can be.

The paradigm must reverse.  Hard coded journeys can’t prescribe what analytics has.  Analytics have to drive dynamic onboarding journeys that execute what it needs. These processes must move from being controlled by IT to being controlled by executive teams. This was the motivation that lead to the formation of PrinSIX.