The Advantages of Automating Customer Onboarding Systems

Opening a new account or applying for a mortgage involves asking for and handling customer information from different sources and from almost any device. And, of course, formats are completely unpredictable. However, relying on outdated, manual processes adds cost to your operations and ultimately affects your net income.

With today's technology, automating customer onboarding systems has become mission-critical for organizations looking to deliver a seamless experience to their customers. By implementing customer onboarding automation, you can streamline the entire process, reducing manual effort and increasing efficiency. This not only saves valuable time but also ensures a consistent and personalized onboarding journey for each customer.

With improved automation solutions, you can enhance the overall customer experience, leaving a lasting impression right from the initial interaction. Let's explore the disadvantages of manual account onboarding processes and the many advantages of automated customer onboarding systems.

Drawbacks of Manual Account Onboarding Processes

1. Costly and Prone to Delays: Manual processes lack visibility, leading to delays in servicing or even acquiring the customer and have the potential for leaving tasks unfinished. Moreover, errors can occur, resulting in incomplete or insufficient information and regulatory non-compliance. Possibilities exist for incurring heavy fines and creating harm to your reputation.
2. Increasing Regulatory Burden: Recent government and industry regulations aimed at consumer protection and fraud prevention have made information gathering, document verification, and fact-checking a more complex part of the account opening process. This emerging complexity can lead to errors, non-compliance, fines, and lengthened onboarding experiences.
3. Top Regulatory Concerns: Your bank must focus on compliance with Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020 (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations. While these regulations, in addition to customer data privacy and protection regulations, reporting obligations, and cross-border regulations, create complexity and add costs that must be managed.

Based on the Tungsten Automation (formerly Kofax) 2022 Intelligent Automation Benchmark Study, these are the key drivers for implementing onboarding process automation: 

Meeting Customer Expectations

Your customers and prospective customers are sophisticated, connected, and empowered. They expect their banks to offer flexible, 24/7 transaction capabilities, adaptability to their needs, ease of use, and maximum confidentiality and data security. Effective customer onboarding is crucial, as it sets the stage for customer relationships. Engaging customers immediately after account opening is vital for driving the adoption of online and mobile banking services and nurturing long-term relationships.

Automated onboarding systems powered by an intelligent automation platform such as Tungsten Automation TotalAgility offer numerous advantages over manual processes.

The 5 Key Benefits of Automated Onboarding Systems

1. Accelerate the Onboarding Process: With intelligent automation, you can provide a fast and personalized onboarding experience that sets the stage for customer satisfaction. Customers can use their preferred channels to submit documents and information, enabling near real-time visibility for all stakeholders. Automated routing expedites the process and facilitates error detection, regulatory compliance, and sales opportunities.
2. Increase Efficiency and Decrease Costs: Streamlined workflows reduce labor-intensive tasks, enhancing the bottom line. Electronic documents minimize paper-related costs, while best-practice workflows guide sales representatives and self-service customers, expediting the processing and closing of business faster and improving abandonment rates. Data analytics help identify bottlenecks and optimize performance.
3. Mitigate Risk and Promote Compliance: Tracking documents and data throughout the entire lifecycle facilitates audits and compliance with financial regulations. Seamless information transfer, controlled access to electronic documents, and real-time monitoring of transactions, fraud, and compliance issues ensure data accuracy, quality, and security. Being compliant builds customer trust and highlights your efforts to protect their information and interests.
4. Enhance Customer Communication: Optimize communication channels to reach customers where they prefer to engage. Equip customer service representatives with the information they need for authoritative phone interactions. Personalize customer communications using client information while adhering to privacy expectations. Easily edit communications to accommodate market changes, regulations, or branding adjustments.
5. Seize Business Opportunities: Gain a comprehensive overview of the operating performance parameters that enable fact-based decisions and improve market competitiveness. Equip your sales agents with insights across multiple functions, systems, and channels so they can recommend tailored offers. Establish best-practice rules to efficiently guide everyone involved in the process and drive more business.

Onboarding is your customer’s first experience with your institution and is crucial to ensuring long-term satisfaction. And, of course, satisfaction directly affects renewal rates and your bottom line. Tungsten intelligent automation technology can make the onboarding process a smooth, fast, and painless operation for everyone involved.

Consider starting your intelligent automation with:

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