APQC recently chatted with Darren Rehrer and David Kazel of Centric Consulting about the challenges and benefits of optimizing customer onboarding in a digital age.
Darren and David will be leading a breakout session at APQC’s 2016 Process Improvement Conference Oct. 3-7: Optimizing the Customer Onboarding Process in a Digital Age.
You can connect with Centric Consulting on LinkedIn
Q. What are the challenges that make process transformation for customer onboarding so difficult within the financial services and healthcare industries?
There are two significant challenges. The first, which applies to many industries, is aligning backend processes with customer expectations. It is critical to align the customer expectations with how the backend processes and teams work. For instance, Google, Amazon, and other sites have driven an expectation of great, easy, interactive/adaptive customer experiences (e.g., no retyping of information, use existing information, don’t sell me something I already have, if I’ve come to you once you should have all my info). The backend processes of organizations are typically legacy systems, have manual exception processing, and not so adaptive thus creating a gap between expectations and capabilities. This gap must be closed to develop an optimum experience.
The second challenge is the protection of data in these heavily regulated industries. In healthcare, HIPPA rules dictate what information can be seen, by whom, and how long it is retained. In the financial service industries, federal banking regulations set the guidelines for data privacy.
Q. What technical components do healthcare and financial services organizations need to focus on to make customer onboarding a success?
There are five key technical components to support customer onboarding success:
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Process optimization. Responsive, adaptive front-ends that leverage workflow or business process management tools to streamline, manage, and provide visibility to back office processing.
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Omni-channel support. Technologies to support omni-channel interaction (e.g., build a solution with user interface components displayed across mobile, desktop, call center, walk in front-ends) while maintaining security and enabling responsiveness from a design standpoint.
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Integration capability. Partnership or integrations with third-party authorization tools for identity verification, insurance eligibility/coverage, business data verification, credit-worthiness. Such as e.g., Experian, ThreatMetrix, Lexis Nexis.Chex; managing insurance information (e.g., track coverage and eligibility from the provider) in the healthcare industry.
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Access to insights. Analytics and reporting tools need to be available to provide feedback on the user experience and processing (automated and manual) is critical. For example, feedback on the abandonment rate of frontend interactions with customers can help drive improvements. In addition to creating the insights, there needs to be a repository to house and provide visibility; on the insights and associated business rules. These rules can span order release, loan/credit approval, product cross-sell, insurance exception processing, standard benefits and many others.
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Electronic signature. This technology is critical. For example, in healthcare organizations may require certified electric signatures for nurses or doctors creating electronic prescriptions. Or in the case of financial service organizations requiring electronic signatures for credit/loan documents (sometimes for multiple account owners).
Q. What considerations do you need to include to stay customer-centric during process improvements?
First, only ask for information that is truly needed and gather periphery or marketing information later in process (i.e. after on-boarded). Another consideration is to build an adaptive frontend to target questions required to specific customer needs. Tailor the experience for the specific customer types (e.g., HSA customer vs. Medicare or personal banking vs. commercial) and make it a satisfying customer experience. For instance, when onboarding a small business there are different business types; partnerships should be asked different questions than a sole proprietorship. Healthcare insurance plans can be tailored to the insurance type.
Understand customer needs and expectations and what drives value for them is key. Typically a combination of voice of the customer and your own experiences can help derive the optimal customer experience.
Q. In your experience, what is the key to identifying performance metrics to measure customer onboarding success?
There are several common measures that organizations can consider to measure customer onboarding success or identify improvement opportunities, such as:
- front-end or web analytics—such as abandonment rate, abandonment fields, at what points a FAQ is selected or Chat is engaged. This information helps identify potential improvement opportunities.
- product options or click rates—this information can be used to remove “unnecessary” questions, fields, or pages. For example, if you notice only 1 percent of applicants are using certain functionality (e.g. no users select overdraft protection or users do not enter multiple phone numbers) and it is not a compliance requirement, remove it or move it to a post onboarding activity.
- customer activity numbers—such as the number of touches, times saved, and resumed. This information indicates where customers interface with the product and how much.
- overall processing times—such as how long does it take to complete components like onboarding or new product application, manual review or processing, benefits verification, account opening, funding) or the entire application timeline. This information helps identify cycle time improvements..
- cross-sell effectiveness—indicates the how good were you at cross selling products (i.e. were other products added to the cart or applied for).