How to onboard customers in less than 5 minutes
As people are getting more and more used to the digital landscape, the pace that it brings and the increased amount of options for the same products or services, time-consuming, manual onboarding processes are no longer an option.
Because let's be real, who has the time to wait for your product or service, when there's other, swifter and more customer-focused options to choose from?
Why is digital customer onboarding the way to go?
The list of cons with manual processes can be made long, with things like lack of resources, overwhelming amount of information and quality control issues topping the list. Instead opting for a digitalized onboarding will help you:
Be more cost-efficient
Create faster processes
Enhance customer experience
APIs & How to use them in an onboarding flow
APIs can be described as building blocks to help you remove manual steps and optimize your digital processes. They are easily built in and integrated to your systems to help you cut away any type of manual steps you'd like to.
When using APIs in an onboarding flow, you decide which part of the onboarding flow you'd like to automate, find an API that will do that for you, and then integrate that API to your process. Let's say that you today (manually) have to check if each new customer is on a PEP or sanctions lists, before accepting them as customers. This means endless amounts of manual checks done on multiple sources, costing the company both time and money. When you instead could choose to integrate APIs for that, eliminating all of that manual, repetitive work.
Breakdown of an API-reliant onboarding flow
So how do you go about creating an onboarding flow built on APIs? Below is an example of how a B2B onboarding flow could look, where the actual customer interaction and effort is minimized down to the entry of a social security number and Bank ID authentication in the beginning of the flow, and e-signing at the end of it.
The onboarding process starts with the customer entering their social security number and authorizing their identity with Bank ID (or any other e-id solution). The rest of the information (ex. personal information, addresses, company engagements, PEP & Sanctions status and signatory rights) is then collected, verified and stored, digitally and automatically with the help of APIs.
This enables a way of automating the process completely, meaning your online business can be open 24/7, approving or declining customers without manual assessment. If the onboarding process was completed successfully, and the customer is approved, he/she is then asked to sign digitally before getting instant access to your product or service.
Conclusion
Using APIs to automize your onboarding process will help you remove as many manual steps as you'd like to, giving the customer a great experience, while saving you time, money and resources that you can put elsewhere.
