The importance of going digital for customer onboarding and enrollment

When you sign-up for a new streaming service or open up a new bank account from the comfort of your apartment you might miss the invisible infrastructure that’s guiding your enrollment. As a customer, that’s not a bad thing. That means that the company you’re patronizing has done a great job designing their digital onboarding experience. 

Today, quality digital enrollment requires the right mix of security, UX design, automation, and user empathy. There’s a delicate balance between providing a user with a seamless experience online and ensuring that you’re not allowing any bad actors onto your platform. 

In the old days of purely in-person onboarding, it was easy for a business to validate who a prospective client was before onboarding them as a customer. They could ask for identification, personal information, or any other contextual information that might help the business get to know their customer. But, those days of exclusive in-person and analog onboarding are gone. Now, companies must adopt digital onboarding to serve customers securely and at scale. Airkit gives you powerful tools to do just that. 

Leave paper in the past. 

When you welcome a customer to your platform, you typically have to field sensitive information like email addresses, phone numbers, or credit card details. Keeping that information safe is paramount to your customers’ trust in your business. 

If you’re using paper forms for those critical onboarding steps, you’re leaving your customer’s information out in the open. While you might be able to set access and permission controls on a digital asset like a contract, the security controls for a paper form are typically much more limited. The only real recourse is locking the form away and hoping it doesn’t go outside a trusted chain of company custody. 

Paper forms not only present more of a risk than digital forms, they also tax customer satisfaction and slow down your internal onboarding processes. Digital forms give you the power to decrease customer abandonment rates, fix cumbersome, analog UX flows, and delight your customers. 

For example, if a customer starts their digital enrollment but leaves halfway through completing a form, Airkit allows you to schedule and send a reminder to that customer to finish the process, even maintaining the completed information before they dropped off.

Airkit customer, MetLife, digitized a formerly paper Statement of Health form required by the company before offering insurance coverage. By digitizing the form, MetLife was able to increase the form’s completion rate by 50%. 

The data showed that applicants clearly preferred digital forms to analog. Four out of five applicants reported being satisfied with the experience, while 99% of applicants completed the form online as opposed to using a paper form.

The promise of digital forms 

Customers today are used to getting virtually anything done with the phone in the palm of their hand. They might be buying a car, putting an offer on a house, or wiring money from account to account, all using digital processes. 

The infrastructure to make a secure, scalable onboarding experience is there. You just have to make sure you use it correctly. 

Some digital onboarding experiences might process sensitive information merely by sending it from one web portal to a database, without securing it in-flight. While the information you need to onboard a customer will get from point A to B, the security risk outweighs the benefit of speed.

Airkit’s platform has security built-in from the start. So, when you build anything from onboarding forms to payment processing experiences, that security infrastructure supports those workflows. 

For example, Airkit customer SkipTheDishes was able to drastically increase their onboarding rates using digital forms, all the while maintaining quality UX and stalwart security. 

Using Airkit’s platform, they doubled the number of partners onboarded per month, reduced their onboarding time by 40%, and completed 80% of onboardings without agent intervention. 

Airkit’s platform ferries information securely from digital forms to your company’s backend, database, or preferred third-party software automatically. Instead of wrestling with homespun software, or trying to make legacy software bend to fit the CX experience you had in mind for your customer, you can build what you had in mind with Airkit. 

Take control of your customer onboarding and customer experience using digital forms. Build them with Airkit. 

Learn more about getting started by connecting with the Airkit team today.