How digital agent onboarding is disrupting the customer experience

How do you ensure faster and more efficient client acquisition? Digital agent onboarding is a crucial ingredient to ensure that your clients are happy and satisfied from the onset.

When a new client makes the decision to sign up with any agency, this is usually a huge moment filled with many emotions, questions, anxieties, and nerves.

Some such questions would be:

Did we make the right decision?
Will this agency deliver everything they promised in the sales process?
Can we hit the ground running with some positive results?
How long would it take this agency to get us where we want our company to be?

To address all these questions and jitters, you need a proper client onboarding process. Typically, you may already have a manual system in place that formalizes your working relationship, gathers important information and sets expectations.

But then you want to reduce every risk of future miscommunications and disagreements, and show your clients that you pay attention to detail. The digital onboarding process might be the answer and is fast becoming the default way to onboard not just clients but internal teams. Digital transformation is a must for every business as it presents the means to find tools that make life easier and painless. Still, you might wonder – how does it work?

In this guide, we will explain everything you need to know about the digital agent onboarding process, especially its benefits to banking, financial services and other companies. That way you can make the best decision to implement a painless, and stress-free process that quickly transforms new clients into long-term customers.

What is digital agent onboarding?

Digital agent onboarding allows companies and organizations to incorporate users and customers in a fast, secure and automated way to streamline their customer onboarding process.

In lay terms, you can sign up new customers and employees from the onset and continue their journey online without having them physically visit your office. This is why digital onboarding is also called online or remote onboarding.

Client, or customer onboarding refers to activities performed during the acquisition of new customers alongside subsequent interactions that complete that customer’s lifecycle. It could also include activities that encompass reviewing clients and expanding existing relationships with the addition of new products and services. Hence the client onboarding process isn’t a once and over job for new customers but will continue to impact the complete client lifecycle.

Why is digital onboarding transforming businesses?

Before now, the onboarding process would involve clients providing data either in-person or through the mail, thereby kickstarting an expensive and time-consuming process. Every client may have to go through a multitude of processes across different departments including, operational, credit, and legal, thereby creating a confusing scene.

This traditional manual onboarding is inconvenient. Think about manual handling, lengthy due diligence, and interference from different stakeholders. Departments may also send conflicting documents to one another.

This type of onboarding process for both new and existing customers costs your company a lot of time and resources and is quite tedious. These paper-based systems can also make the process feel impersonal, making the customer feel undervalued.

Again, as regulations continue to evolve, there is a need to revisit your processes time and time again to update the onboarding process.

Looking at all of the different limitations of a manual system, it’s no wonder a growing number of businesses and enterprises, especially in the banking and financial sectors are capitalizing on the latest technological advancements to provide superior onboarding services.

In this time and age, where your potential clients are online, a secure and digital onboarding solution is a must-have.

Benefits of migrating to digital onboarding

Migrating to digital agent onboarding can only bring tremendous value and benefits to your business. Digital agent onboarding enables skillful management of your onboarding process so that your team and customers can enjoy a better partnership.

Digital agent onboarding processes can also enable companies to introduce new products and services to their existing customers, with better interactions and results.

Beyond the use of the cloud, the onboarding process today also integrates blockchain, digital identities, Artificial intelligence (AI), biometrics, Strong customer authentication, and data collaboration. For instance, companies can use AI monitoring to supervise the client onboarding process, thereby solving problems in real-time.

In the same vein, companies can use blockchain to create a secure, decentralized ledger that manages customer data, allows users to access their information, and makes it easier to define a client’s risk profile and preferences. Co-browsing, video chat, and chatbot solutions enable real-time interactions as well.

In the end, a well-organized onboarding process increases customer satisfaction, boosts revenue, and ensures your customers see you as an experienced trustworthy service provider. Other benefits of a digitalized onboarding process include:

1. Satisfied employees

With a digital agent onboarding process, your employees no longer have to be actively involved in the mundane and routine aspects of the onboarding process. This dramatically reduces workflow and ensures they have time for other more important tasks that validate their roles and responsibilities. Hence they become less stressed about the job and more productive.

2. Saves customers time

Your customers today demand an onboarding process that takes hours and days, not weeks. They are busier than ever and do not like repetitive interactions, too much paperwork, and time-consuming interactions. Going digital will drastically cut down onboarding time and ensure they can enjoy an automated onboarding process with minimal points of interaction.

Furthermore, a study by Forrester shows that 66% of adults believe valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to offer a good online customer experience. Hence, the convenience of a shorter onboarding time will also empower your customer experience and help you avoid losing potential customers, especially in the last stages of client-acquiring processes.

3. Transform your brand image

A faster onboarding process that is fully digital enables new customers to have a positive impression of your brand. They will see your brand as trustworthy, and professional. The faster onboarding process will also help validate your expertise and enable you to outperform your competition, especially those who have yet to implement digital onboarding solutions.

4. A sense of being valued

A quicker onboarding process will also enable your customers to feel valued and heard. They will love the convenience of interacting with your brand from their comfort zone. Typically, your digital onboarding process may also involve them becoming part of a forum, group, or having a live chat with a company representative. Again, the use of smart analytics and artificial intelligence will help you better understand your client’s needs and convenience so you can offer channels and processes that are most suitable for them. All these are unique touch-points that will further personalize their experience and make them feel valued and important.

5. Targets the complete customer lifecycle

A digital onboarding experience ensures that your customer’s information and preferences remain the same regardless of the channel used in accessing your service. This further eliminates friction across digital and physical channels. Already, your customers expect this unified and prolific experience across all products, LOBs, and services as the first interaction is no longer enough to sustain the relationship. With a digitalized system, you can achieve that 360-degree view and beyond.

6. Limits room for error

Providing an enhanced experience to the end-user also demands capturing and defining all client data and information accurately. Digital onboarding typically uses digital documents and signatures that will eliminate physical back-and-forth documentation to maintain consistency and accuracy across all touchpoints. This, in turn, creates a swifter and safer experience.

7. Compliance, control, and transparency

A digitalized onboarding process is highly important to meet the strictest and rapidly evolving robust risk and compliance. It also ensures that your brand becomes more transparent about customer data and how they use it. Besides these benefits, it will also drastically reduce cost, boost productivity, eliminate waiting times and barriers. Combined, these benefits are highly important to the financial industry.

8. Avenues to implement robust security

A manual onboarding system creates serious security gaps that have led to a high number of fraud cases. By contrast, digital onboarding platforms use digital identity solutions that add extra layers of trust and security, thereby helping your business mitigate identity fraud and other cybersecurity threats.

9. A more sustainable way to grow your business

A study from Harvard Business Review showed that 80% of executives affirm that an increased focus on onboarding offers a notable and positive impact over the life of the contract for revenues, client referrals, and client renewals. Furthermore, 63% of customers will consider your onboarding program when making a purchasing decision.

All these clearly show the need to develop an exceptional onboarding process. Ultimately, most of your customers today are digitally savvy. Hence, an automated client fulfillment process that starts off each client engagement clearly and consistently will drive tremendous value to your brand and give you the edge over your competitors.

How Monocept speeds up and simplifies digital agent onboarding

Monocept was founded to help businesses find and eliminate all frustrations in their onboarding process by implementing a modern and seamless onboarding solution that empowers your unique business environment.

Our digital onboarding solutions lower barriers to digitalization, with plenty of room for flexibility and customization. That way, no matter your market, resources, or size, you can create a comprehensive onboarding process that helps you gain a deeper understanding of your customers from the onset, improve conversion rates, and make educated risk-based decisions.

With Monocept, you can look forward to a delightful and fully automated client-facing platform that enhances interaction in the onboarding journey, digitizes, automates document workflow, provides clear instructions and instant feedback to your customers, supports a wide variety of ID times, allows for cross-platform and architecture support to fit your existing business processes, and enable compliance with all appropriate regulations. We can also help you implement due diligence and compliance using automation in just a matter of hours. In the end, you will achieve a flexible, cost-conscious, compliant, and effortless customer experience to onboard all clients and employees in a matter of minutes, not weeks.

Ready to learn more about how our digital agent onboarding solution can help scale your business and drive tremendous value and revenue? Let Monocept amplify your entire onboarding process from start to finish. Get in touch today.