The Customer Journey, Stage 2A: Multichannel Account Enrolment

Wel­come to this third install­ment of my series on the cus­tomer journey.

In the first arti­cle of this series, we cov­ered the aware­ness stage of the cus­tomer jour­neys, explor­ing retar­get­ing and data inte­gra­tion across plat­forms. In the sec­ond arti­cle, we exam­ined the acqui­si­tion stage , in which the data from the aware­ness phase can help “close the loop” between off­site and onsite experiences.

But before we move on to the next stage of the cus­tomer jour­ney, it’s impor­tant to take a moment to address the final—and too often neglected—component of the acqui­si­tion stage: forms.

Forms and appli­ca­tions are cru­cial for new account signups, but very few busi­ness­es make any effort to stream­line them—even as they spend mil­lions of dol­lars on build­ing user pro­files and opti­mis­ing every oth­er step of the acqui­si­tion process.

And then, halfway through that cut­ting-edge expe­ri­ence, the web­site or app sud­den­ly dumps users onto a huge unweildy appli­ca­tion form, and refus­es to take them fur­ther until they com­plete it.

The sit­u­a­tion is even more dire on mobile devices, where many cus­tomers strug­gle to fill out forms at all—despite the fact that, in Adobe’s 2016 Econ­sul­tan­cy sur­vey on dig­i­tal trends in the finan­cial ser­vices indus­try (FSI), a full 74 per­cent of respon­dents said they expect mobile to be a major source of new account signups with­in the next three years.

This road­block has real con­se­quences: We recent­ly found that near­ly 70 per­cent of new cus­tomers drop out of the signup process when they encounter an archa­ic form.

How do you go about deliv­er­ing a great mul­ti­chan­nel forms process? That’s the job of an enrol­ment solu­tion frame­work, which we describe as being com­posed of four main components.

Deliv­er­ing simplicity

The first com­po­nent is to deliv­er seam­less cross-chan­nel experiences.

Many signup process­es still rely on “wet” paper sig­na­tures, often due to com­pli­ance laws. Even dig­i­tal forms often require e‑signatures that few cus­tomers know how to cre­ate and infor­ma­tion they don’t know where to find. Very lit­tle work has been done to pin­point where in the process cus­tomers are drop­ping out—but we know that when they do drop out, all their progress will be lost.

Fix­ing all these issues will take time, but one step your engi­neers can take imme­di­ate­ly is to enable form progress to be saved. As cus­tomers work through any part of your signup form, your back­end should auto­mat­i­cal­ly save that infor­ma­tion, and they should be able to pick the process back up exact­ly where they left off, on any device.

By the same token, your back­end should auto­mat­i­cal­ly pop­u­late each form with every piece of data you already have about your cus­tomers. Cus­tomers should nev­er have to re-enter infor­ma­tion they’ve already pro­vid­ed on anoth­er form or at any oth­er touch point. In fact, exist­ing cus­tomers should nev­er have to enter infor­ma­tion at all if any­one in your orga­ni­za­tion has access to it. Auto­com­ple­tion should be the rule, not the exception.

Enabling progress

The sec­ond com­po­nent of our enroll­ment frame­work is to enable paper­less and com­pli­ant interactions.

The Roy­al Bank of Scot­land (RBS), for exam­ple, lets cus­tomers authen­ti­cate by snap­ping a pho­to of their iden­ti­ty card with their phone’s cam­era. Their soft­ware also uses opti­cal char­ac­ter-recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy to autopop­u­late onsite forms with the customer’s name, address, and oth­er info found on the customer’s ID. Then their back­end runs a series of 36 bor­der-lev­el secu­ri­ty checks on that ID to ensure it’s compliant.

If some­one under the age of 18 attempts to open a bank account, RBS has a sys­tem in place to auto­mat­i­cal­ly noti­fy that person’s par­ents (this infor­ma­tion is request­ed onsite) and request elec­tron­ic autho­riza­tion for the account. This sin­gle change has reduced account-open­ing time from days to just hours.

Accel­er­at­ing flexibility

As RBS learned, robust form ana­lyt­ics can do more than just dras­ti­cal­ly reduce your dropoff rate—they can actu­al­ly increase the speed at which you acquire new cus­tomers. That brings us to the third com­po­nent of Adobe’s enrol­ment frame­work: accel­er­at­ing time-to-mar­ket and flexibility.

The more your form back­end shares data across plat­forms and devices, the more your employ­ees can lever­age that data to onboard cus­tomers across every touch­point. For exam­ple, if a cus­tomer has dropped out of a form process on a tablet, that individual’s next in-branch vis­it should trig­ger a con­ver­sa­tion with a branch employ­ee, who can ask where the cus­tomer met with difficulty—further sharp­en­ing your analytics—and help com­plete the form in person.

We recent­ly did some form opti­mi­sa­tion work with Ned­bank, one of the largest banks in South Africa. Out of the 200 dif­fer­ent forms the bank used, 20 of them account­ed for 96 per­cent of their sales volume—and every one of those 20 forms looked com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent and asked cus­tomers to repeat infor­ma­tion they’d already pro­vid­ed to the bank on oth­er forms.

Ned­bank per­formed form field analy­sis to find out where cus­tomers were drop­ping out, then cre­at­ed a con­sis­tent user flow with a sin­gle mobile-first data mod­el. The results were strik­ing: Nedbank’s form com­ple­tion ratio jumped from about 33 per­cent to a whop­ping 80 per­cent, and the onboard­ing process dropped from days, or even weeks, to a mat­ter of a few hours.

Opti­mis­ing experiences

Robust ana­lyt­ics do more than just tell you where peo­ple are drop­ping out. They also enable you to opti­mise the form expe­ri­ence as a whole—not just in terms of con­sis­ten­cy, as Ned­bank did, but also around the indi­vid­ual customer.

Many of us already use adap­tive web tech­nol­o­gy to gen­er­ate land­ing pages and in-app mes­sag­ing around the needs and goals of indi­vid­ual cus­tomers. Why not do the same with forms? Imag­ine arriv­ing on a form page and see­ing a form that’s not only pre­pop­u­lat­ed with your info, but also per­son­alised around your spe­cif­ic goals and interests.

A forms dash­board can gen­er­ate and deliv­er these per­son­alised forms on the fly, as they’re need­ed, with­out any IT devel­op­ment and release cycle. This dash­board can also lever­age ana­lyt­ics from these forms to devel­op deep and gran­u­lar insights about where users are drop­ping off or slow­ing down, enabling you to fur­ther opti­mise and refine your forms processes.

The ben­e­fits of a mul­ti­chan­nel enrol­ment frame­work are easy to see. As RBS and Ned­bank dis­cov­ered, it increas­es mobile con­ver­sion, improves the cross-chan­nel user expe­ri­ence, strength­ens cus­tomer engage­ment, and reduces costs through­out the organisation—all while gen­er­at­ing less paper and less post, and speed­ing time-to-market.

With a stream­lined enrol­ment frame­work in place, you’ll be well posi­tioned to move your cus­tomers toward the next two stages of their jour­ney: onboard­ing and next-best action. I’ll be div­ing into both those stages in my next arti­cle of this series. See you there.