Every interaction with the customer is an opportunity to create a positive impression. As businesses work hard to keep up with customer expectations, they are re-evaluating ways to elevate customer experiences with the most appropriate technology applications.
Customer behaviors have also evolved dramatically in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and have compelled industries to accelerate digital transformation initiatives. This digitization drive is compelling telecom operators to identify new revenue streams as plummeting revenues from voice and competition from OTT services have made the playfield more complex.
Telecom providers now have to provide value-added services in addition to their portfolio of offerings, enable mobile money, and integrate digital payments into the telecom ecosystem.
Challenges with Customer Onboarding
Today customer experience revolves around seamless integration and is driven by convenience. As such, the customer onboarding process is crucial, for it elevates the first step of the journey around any product lifecycle.
Customer onboarding is a very sensitive journey that customers embark on with businesses. A closer look at most customer onboarding journeys reveals the deficiencies of human touchpoints. Human touchpoints are the interfaces at which information is shared by the customer and the organization or business.
Customers don’t want to enter their information manually through these touchpoints and want seamless automation. The data is usually readily available and can be extracted from documents or found in-house and on external systems.
The latency between touchpoints, complex and demanding analogue interactions, and communications being delivered in formats which are not mobile-enabled impede customer experiences and increase frustration. Identifying ways to digitally transform the customer onboarding process emerges as a strategic priority to enhance the overall user experience.
Digital Transformation of the Onboarding Process is Imminent
As the competitive landscape becomes more challenging, telcos must look toward packing in as much value as possible into critical business operations such as the onboarding process. They need to mitigate the vulnerabilities of human touchpoints and ensure that customer journeys shift towards positive outcomes.
Digital onboarding is now an immediate priority for any business across any sector. Onboarding is described as the phase in which the customer gets started on using a product or service. All the processes that need to get the customer started to fall under the umbrella of onboarding.
Digitising onboarding demands the execution of these processes with the least manual intervention and ensures that customer onboarding and identity verification are simple, and intuitive, and don’t compromise on security.
Moving to digital onboarding is also becoming essential for telcos because of the increasing regulatory landscape and compliance demands. Staying compliant can add to overall costs but not staying compliant can cost a business more long-term.
With the compliance and regulatory landscape becoming strict and complex, there arises a demand for the increased accuracy of data processing. Maintaining data transparency has never been more critical than today. Elevating customer experiences need data, and expecting a customer to re-enter data or use a slow, manual process is what leads to customer frustration.
Digitization ensures that data is recorded, stored, and can be accessed at any time for designing personalised customer experiences.
Digital transformation of the customer experience also starts with onboarding because nothing causes more grievance to the customer than processing data that they know is already available somewhere. That apart, ensuring the integrity and security of the data is of critical importance not only to gain customer trust but also to remain on the right side of regulatory authorities.
How Digital Onboarding Drives Customer Experience
Digital onboarding uses an array of technologies to supercharge the entire customer acquisition process and ensure that they are engaged and happy with interactive experiences. Here’s how digital onboarding works:
- Instant document validation and verification using machine learning and automated verification and identification technologies.
- Simplified data entry and validation using OCR-based automated data extraction from documents. This also makes the process faster, more accurate and time-efficient.
- Greater data accuracy and security using mobile apps. Apps request mandatory permissions necessary for the KYC process and also enable OTP-based validation.
- Prevent impersonation fraud and make online onboarding more secure by leveraging machine learning-based face match validation and liveness detection.
- Deliver country-specific identity document integration.
- Deliver a higher degree of security and privacy protection using comprehensive security controls while facilitating fast authentication.
- Make digital identity verification and onboarding convenient and secure by employing technologies such as AI, image analytics, and powerful automation.
- Launch mobile money and financial services offerings with confidence while accounting for the regulatory demands of both the telecom and finance sectors.
Conclusion
Today’s customers are well versed with digital interactions and are clear in what they want from them. Seamless, simple, intuitive experiences contribute toward elevated customer experiences. The inability to do so causes customers to switch to competitors in no time.
Since first impressions are often last impressions, digitally driven onboarding processes help influence the customers positively and drive organisations on the path to profitability. Let us help you in your quest to boost customer engagement and loyalty by starting with customer onboarding.