At HooYu we held a webinar on why so many gaming operators are managing to lose 30% of their potential customers during the onboarding phase. We’ve also released a report diving deep into the issue and uncovered five ways you can improve your customer onboarding journey.

While our research was focused on the gaming industry, other industries tend to lose far more customers, so implementing these changes should help every business. We looked at journeys both inside and outside of the UK, and the differences were remarkable, largely thanks to the robust databases available in the UK that simply don’t exist elsewhere.

5 – Use logic steps so your customers aren’t overwhelmed

When building a KYC journey in the UK it is key to have logic steps between the database check and any further KYC processes that are needed. These logic steps are used to determine whether or not further information is required from the customer.

For example, if there’s no match with identity database checks, then a fuller ID document and proof of address journey should trigger automatically. Don’t compel your customers to fill in all aspects of KYC information from the start if it can be obtained through data checks. Only when automated processes and checks fail to return a result should you increase the customer’s burden. Gathering information in stages and when necessary is more effective than frontloading the customer’s efforts.

4 – Localise your approach to meet your customers

For customer journeys that are built outside of the UK we found that the customer abandonment rate leaps to an average of 40%.

Not having access to strong customer databases and being able to form actionable insights from that can be difficult. It means you need to both gather more identity information from customers and be more patient with them in terms of communicating the reasons why you need certain documentation.

You can also improve the customer onboarding journey by focusing on localising the experience. Rather than blankly asking for an identity document or proof of address, small tweaks to reference specific examples of accepted documents and in the customer’s preferred language make the journey more familiar to them.

HooYu has an extensive suite of localisation and language tools that can automatically detect and adapt to the customer’s device setting and geolocation, so that there’s no guesswork in the process.

3 – Establish trust to improve your customer onboarding journey

Outside of the UK, the customer onboarding journey can take up to a day longer to complete the journey. That’s a long time to wait to make a bet. This again goes to the database difference. But customers don’t care about databases you check their information against, and they’re rarely interested in the function of that data – for them it has no discernible bearing on their lives.

To gain trust, and engage the customer, it’s key to make sure they understand why this information is important and that it takes time to be processed. Telling customers why you need a proof of identity document is far more effective in obtaining that document than simply requesting it without contextual information. If you can also communicate that it takes time to be processed and why, then that honesty will help establish trust.

This doesn’t mean you need to deliver an in-depth explanation of data verification processes; a simply high-level explanation will often be enough for most customers. For those customers who are focused on privacy issues you can smooth their concerns with customised messaging that cuts to the heart of why you need that information, how you use it, and confirm to them that it will be used in an appropriate way.

2 – Reduce the time it takes to do KYC

It may feel like an obvious answer, but one of the easiest ways to improve your customer onboarding journey is to make it shorter. You can do this by providing guidance throughout the customer journey with clear and helpful directions that pre-empt common errors that customers make when submitting onboarding documents.

Introducing real-time feedback will also reduce the length of time customers take to complete the journey as they’ll have immediate and helpful directions. And you also need to think about the realities that customers live in, they may just decide to go back to their preferred operator and back out of this new relationship they were about to start with you.

Customers have other concerns that cause them to forget they were engaging with your product. By using user outreach tools, you can nudge customers with an SMS text or an email to re-engage the journey. If you’re able to save customer progress along the way as well it’ll reduce the length of time it takes them to complete.

1 – Focus on their fears and concerns

In our report we saw a significant drop off during the Source of Funds and proof of identity stages of the customer journey. For those who are obsessed with privacy it makes sense to communicate thoroughly how the information is going to be used and provide reassurance. This is especially true for legally binding issues like GDPR – customers with these concerns are usually worried around spam and scams, so setting out exactly how information is used will never hurt.

Making sure the Source of Funds and proof of identity checks are robust is important, it means that criminals who meet your company are self-selecting out of the process.

It also helps to provide reasoning as to why documents are rejected some of these will be boilerplate reasons (glare, unclear photographs) but sometimes the docs will be out of date for your risk-based approach. Making that clear through parameters and reminders will make customers engage with you and be less likely to dismiss it as a bad process.

Find out more on how to improve your customer onboarding journey