Bank’s Digital Sales Results Increase 36% With Improved Onboarding

Converting a banking new account application and subsequent onboarding process for an increasingly digital world is an involved process. To be successful, financial institutions need to build a digital sales strategy, analyzing each step to determine levels of abandonment. The impact of this effort will include increased sales and an improved customer experience.

By Jim Marous, Publisher of Retail Banking Strategies for The Financial Brand and Publisher of the Digital Banking Report

In the last six months, 67% of online retail shoppers have made purchases that involved multiple channels, easily moving from the web, to the tablet, to a store for a consistent and convenient experience. While signing up for a credit card or completing an application for a home loan is not the same as shopping on BestBuy.com, consumers now expect financial institutions to deliver similar digital channel experiences for their banking products and services.

According to a report by Aite Group, Multichannel Client Onboarding: Anytime, Anywhere, Any… How? new consumer preferences and ongoing regulatory changes mean that integrated multichannel new account opening and onboarding processes are needed. It was also determined that organizations that fail to incorporate mobile and Web technologies into their client-facing processes will be left behind.

In short, financial institutions have a customer experience dilemma. In order to fill the growing customer experience gap, banks and credit unions need to digitize, and drastically improve, digital account opening processes to create enhanced consumer experiences or risk a drop-off in the digital sales process down the line.

In the Avoka white paper, Mobile Engagement & Data Collection: 16 Best practices When Building Your Strategy, it was found that focusing on improving digital data collection and new account onboarding processes can result in more deposit accounts opened, more credit cards issued, more loans sold and more satisfied members and customers. In addition, knowing where consumers may have abandoned an account opening process, combined with the agility to rapidly fix problems contributing to abandonment, will drive incremental business.

The Challenge of Digital Sales Abandonment

In a case study provided to The Financial Brand by Avoka, a lender wanted to improve their personal loan application experience for loans averaging $15,000 across digital channels (desktop, tablet and mobile). They didn’t want to touch the loan approval process, but rather, focus on making incremental changes to the digital application and onboarding experience.

The company already had a desktop optimized and mobile optimized application form – and was processing 1,000 applications per week of which 35.7% were submitted to completion (or converted). This equated to $1.7MM per week. However, the lender saw the 64.3% abandonment rates on loan applications as a significant opportunity for improvement.

Unfortunately, the lender didn’t have the analytics built into their online application process to know where the consumer was abandoning the process or why. And even if they did, the customer-coded nature of their loan application experience meant that making changes would be slow and expensive. So, if they had a hypothesis that “changing X” would improve conversions – testing that hypothesis would be expensive, slow, disruptive and risky. They decided instead to invest in a new digital sales tool for transaction-based customer engagement … and the results were staggering.

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