Customer drop-offs during the KYC and onboarding process is a common challenge for Fintech marketers. To retain customers during this process, marketers must find strategies to motivate users to complete the KYC and onboarding process, whether by creating simpler onboarding flows or by actively engaging customers with the right and timely information.
In this X space, Chiedozie Ike, Senior Associate, Customer Lifecycle Marketing at Flutterwave, Ugo Iwuchukwu, Head of Marketing and Partnerships at Bamboo, Paul Ayuk, CEO of Bunce and Ubelejit Dandison, Content Marketing Manager at Bunce talk on the subject, touching on areas like:
- The Importance of KYC and Onboarding process to the customer and the business
- Common causes of customer drop-offs during the KYC and onboarding process
- How to motivate users to complete the KYC and onboarding process
- Important KPIs to track
- Strategies to implement to increase customer retention during KYC and Onboarding
- How Customer Lifecycle Marketing helps to improve customer experience during the onboarding process.
Optimizing KYC and Onboarding for Retention
Here are some highlights from the conversation.
Ubelejit Dandison (Moderator):
How important is customer onboarding especially for financial services and what impact does it have on the customer and the business?
Ugo Iwuchuwku:
I think it’s quite important, especially when you’re in financial services. There’s a bunch of information, you know, you have to collect that lawyers will call KYC, and compliance people call KYC. So there’s a bunch of information that you have to collect, you know, regulatory-wise, and there’s a bunch of information you have to collect as an organization to help you understand, what type of customer you’re acquiring to give you, like, you know, a good sense of what type of behavior or activity do you expect them to transact on your platform.
But the fact that these things are important creates its own problem because each additional step that you add, however important, is an additional opportunity for a customer or a prospect rather, to end up not becoming a customer. So designing an onboarding flow, both from a marketing perspective and from a product, even design perspective, that makes it relatively easy to do this, I think is critical in not just the experience you want your users to start off with, but also how making it easy to get those users in, in the first place.
Ubelejit Dandison:
What are some common causes of customer drop-offs?
Chiedozie Ike:
On average customers are willing to follow your onboarding process for as long as five minutes. When it gets longer than that, the drop-off rates tends to be higher. So one thing you need to do is to optimize that whatever you’re doing can be completed in five minutes or under If possible. It’s easier for products that don’t need a lot of government-related KYC.
For instance, you want to sign up for Uber, you can just use your phone number, they’ll send their OTP and then you check with your email, boom. In under two, or three minutes, you’ve opened accounts. But it’s not the same for a bank, right. Because in our context, right, CBN leads you to collect their address, not just even collect it, there are people that try to go to your houses to check that this person lives there…Right. So yeah, try to make your onboarding process as short as, if possible, and can be completed in five minutes
Ubelejit Dandison:
What are some important KPIs to track during KYC and onboarding?
Paul Ayuk:
Some of the metrics to track when you’re, when you’re doing lifecycle marketing and onboarding is the time when they register to the time when they complete their KYC. And the reason that is important is that some people might just download your application and then just get distracted and go away. Some may download it and then under five minutes, they’ve completed the KYC. So you need to understand the characteristics of each of these types of users.
So if you’re tracking that metric, you’re then able to understand the characteristics of the users and then create tailored strategies that would help them convert better or complete the process better because you now understand their behavior and you now understand their uniqueness in that sense.
Another important metric to track is the completion rate or the drop-off rate. So if you’re having a very low completion rate, that could mean a variety of things, maybe the form is so long or one peculiar case in Nigeria is like if you’re collecting your NIN and you need to verify that NIN by sending them a text to the number attached to the NIN. Now some people have lost that phone number, right? But you could still have alternatives where you could ask them to send the slip.
But maybe that’s not included in your application, In that kind of scenario, understanding that the user is at that point would help you automatically reach out to them through an automated message or through your customer support to get them by saying; hey, we see that this just happened, these are the other alternative methods you could use to complete this process.
And once you’re able to track these data, and use it for your outreach, you’ll find that users are more aligned to and more incentivized to using your platform. Nobody likes stress. In the user’s mind, if there are different applications doing the same thing, why am I going to get so stressed over one? The main reason I’m going to stay with one is because I have a good experience with that one. This should be at the top of your mind if you’re building similar services.
If this sounds interesting, listen to the full conversation to get useful tips like how to motivate users to complete the KYC and onboarding flow and implement customer lifecycle management to increase customer retention.
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