There is no more effective resource for building a business relationship than making an excellent first impression. It is not a whim or a cliché: it is survival.
As psychologist Daniel Palacino explains in this article in El PaÃs, we receive our first impressions by cognitive mechanisms that allow us to adapt to the environment to ensure our survival.
More specifically, the limbic system of our brain produces these responses since its function is to process and attribute a negative or positive value to our experiences long before reason can mediate.
The point is that it is the same in business. A good impression facilitates and accelerates people's decision to purchase our products or services.
Thus, the concept we will discuss in this article —digital onboarding— becomes crucial for our business, in this case, providing more credit and financial products.
We will proceed to describe what onboarding is and list three simple actions you can implement to optimize the onboarding of your prospects and customers and improve their user experience to build loyalty.
What is digital onboarding in the financial sector?
We define digital onboarding as identifying and incorporating new clients through digital channels.
This concept implies that credit applications and other financial products you receive are processed 100% online without your prospects needing to go to a physical branch.
Digital onboarding is a fundamental process for new banking players, including fintech and various Sofomes, and for traditional banks seeking to improve their presence in this channel.
In addition, well-planned onboarding contributes to expanding credit coverage and encourages financial inclusion, especially in countries where formal financing rates still leave out a large part of the population, which generally has no credit history.
Step 1: create or optimize a conversion Landing Page
Since our focus is onboarding, let's assume you have already done the previous task: driving traffic to your website. People are coming; you are looking for those who intend to apply for credit to become your customers.
While there are different ways to approach these prospects, having a conversion landing page is critical. It allows you to provide clear and detailed information about your credit products and encourage users to take action.
The key to an effective landing page, which can motivate the decision to apply for credit, lies in the quality of the content, which must be clear, detailed, precise, and concise.
Whenever possible, choose to use short sentences in your copy, easy-to-understand language, and do your best to ensure that your landing page content addresses the following questions:
What types of loans do you offer? Payroll, mortgage, free investment.
Include all the credit options offered by your institution. This way, your prospects will know if you have the credit alternative they want.
Who are your clients? Men, women, young people, pensioners, farmers, public employees, individuals, or corporations.
Be precise with the target audience for each of your credit products.
What are the amounts you provide? From 1,000 to 10,000 MXN; from 10,000 to 50,000 MXN or from 50,000 to 100,000 MXN.
Specify the values you provide in your loans for each type of credit. With the specifications of the amount, the type of credit, and the target audience, you complete a first informative filter that helps to select your prospects better.
What are the requirements to access the loan? Official identification, proof of address, and application form.
Ask for the minimum amount of documents necessary to validate your prospect's identity. This is one of the most relevant aspects of improving your digital onboarding. It is the central point of our third step, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
What are the credit conditions? Interest rates, interest on late payment, credit terms, and payment methods.
Tell your prospects the conditions of the loan they are considering applying for, so they know whether they can afford to pay.
Finally, don't forget to add the call to action (CTA) buttons so that people can easily recognize where they should start the credit application. A good CTA includes two or three precise words with a specific action, for example: Apply for credit.
Step 2: implement triple-A communication: active, assertive, and amiable
The next step in improving your onboarding is establishing what we will call triple-A communication: active, assertive, and amiable.
Active means that your communication must be constant. People must hear from you regularly.
Assertive means conveying what you do and think as a brand with effectiveness, clarity, and conviction.
Amiable means that beyond using language to convey a compelling message, you can use it to connect with your users, creating a bond and greater emotional closeness.
Establishing communication with these criteria is vital to building a relationship of trust with your new and old clients.
Think that, as a lending institution, you have the identity validation to determine if the person requesting a loan is trustworthy and to avoid fraud when providing a loan.
However, on the part of the people who approach your business, communication is the determining factor in deciding whether they should trust your company.
Therefore, for each of your prospects, it is essential:
Know in real-time if the registration was successful.
Know if the information or documents you provided are correct.
Be aware of how your application is progressing at each step.
Be clear about how your data will be used and protected.
Identify which channels to solve doubts or communicate with you.
You must communicate these messages to your users to convert a registration into a customer and gradually build customer loyalty.
In addition, you can automate these messages easily and deploy them through different channels, such as email, WhatsApp, or text messages.
Finally, identify and strengthen your presence in those channels where it is possible to establish two-way communication with your customers. Listening to people is the most direct way to improve your products and their user experience to differentiate yourself as a brand.
It is worth remembering that Amazon became today's company by putting customer experience as the fundamental pillar to building long-term value from day 1.
There are many lending institutions, some with better interest rates, terms, or payment methods, but how many listen carefully to their customers to give them what they want?
Make your customer prefer you for the experience you offer and connect with their limbic system 😉.
Step 3: reduce requirements and time to validate the identity of your prospects.
Following the example of Amazon and its fundamental pillar of improving the customer experience, we come to the third point: requesting fewer requirements to access a loan.
This is a measure that directly impacts their level of satisfaction since it implies less effort, less time, and greater agility.
According to Gartner's Customer Experience Management Survey 2019, potential service customers are more likely to abandon registration if it requires them to attach documents outside their purses or wallets.
Today, a photo of the INE and the person's general data is enough to obtain the most thorough identity validation report in Mexico and draw up a credit risk profile, even for people with no credit history.
For this reason, reducing the requirements for evaluating whether it is convenient to provide a loan to a new prospect is directly related to improving their experience.
The agility, personalization, efficiency, and convenience provided by the digital processes of fintech have led 85% of their users to consider recommending their services to others and a loyalty level of 90%, compared to 34% of traditional banks, according to the World Retail Banking Report, by the consulting firm Capgemini.
In short:
If you manage to drive your prospects and current customers to an informative, precise, and intuitive transactional page that motivates their action.
You reduce requirements and response times, making sure you ask for accurate data to validate whether people are trustworthy.
And you cultivate a good relationship with your prospects and existing customers through active, assertive, and amiable communication.
Then you're doing great: you already have a fine-tuned credit onboarding process.