3 Powerful Ways to Improve Your Customer Onboarding

If you’re a human in the world, you’ve opened an online account at some point in your life. And if you’ve opened an online account, you know the frustration caused by a poor onboarding experience. And it’s more than just frustration—shoddy onboarding can be a literal deal-breaker for customers, 80% of whom say that a good user experience is as important as the product’s actual quality.¹

Because of the high costs of customer abandonment, most digital businesses always have ongoing internal analyses running of the best ways to improve onboarding without increasing fraud. Here are the three powerful components to look for to ensure you’ve got the best approach to seamless, safe onboarding.

Simplify Fraud Prevention Systems

Half the battle of user onboarding is getting an accurate identity theft and fraud prevention system in place, without causing needless friction. Digital identity document verification is an enormously effective way to ensure that you’re onboarding “good” customers.

So, you know you want identity document verification as an onboarding enabler. However, not all document verification platforms are the same. They can end up introducing unnecessary friction, which will defeat your whole goal of onboarding ease. A key differentiator for document verification is in how customers’ capture photos. They shouldn’t be left on their own to manually take a picture of their documents—manually capturing an image is friction-filled enough on its own, as you make impatient customers go through a tedious step that involves angles, lighting, and even how they hold their phone. But when the result is blurry, hazy photos, those low-quality images will lead to similarly low-quality fraud decisions. Pay close attention to a system’s image capture process—”advanced computer vision,” “machine learning,” and “liveness detection” are some key phrases that indicate low-friction—in order to ensure that an identity document verification process will simplify onboarding with a bare minimum of user friction.

Incorporate Automation Whenever You Can 

Many onboarding checks rely on manual reviews of identities, such as employees visually inspecting an ID. This is both slow and error-prone—two words you NEVER want associated with your onboarding. It also introduces inherent bias and security issues by incorporating unpredictable human elements.

Automation improves all levels of the onboarding process, especially in the fraud prevention step. It lessens human error and bias, increases user-friendliness, ensures robust security, and completes the process in seconds (rather than hours or days). The best way to ensure accuracy for every aspect of your onboarding is to decrease manual labor and increase back-end technology automation.

Focus on Accessibility

One of the best ways to hurt your onboarding process is to ignore accessibility. For example, the evolving technology behind “liveness detection,” which works in parallel with the biometric checks that are crucial to effective identity verification. Many liveness detection systems ask a user to read off a screen, or follow a dot, roll their head left to right, or any combination of similar gesture-based tests to prove liveness. That is a very tedious component of onboarding at best, and at worst it’s simply impossible for some potential customers to complete. For example, if a user is unable to move a certain way, if their lighting is wrong to show their movements, or if their bandwidth lags, they could be deemed “not live.”

The best way to improve accessibility without degrading fraud security is to look into identity verification solutions that provide passive liveness detection. This might take the form of a fully integrated process that can read the data and photo from an ID, along with a selfie, and incorporate machine learning to check biometrics and accuracy on the backend, and confirm an identity without all of the friction-filled movements. This creates a more efficient onboarding flow that locks out identity fraudsters and unlocks accessibility for legitimate applicants.

The Socure Predictive DocV Difference

Unparalleled onboarding is at the core of Socure’s new Predictive DocV. In fact, it will take you more time to read this paragraph than it would take for Socure to verify the identity of a good customer at onboarding and give them access to your ecosystem. Watch this recorded demo to see how it all works together or, even better, let our team of experts show you all the ways that Socure’s Predictive DocV will help you improve your onboarding.

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¹https://www.salesforce.com/resources/articles/customer-expectations/