Onboarding is critical to the success of your product, and failure to define an effective onboarding process will affect product adoption among new and existing users and ultimately lead to high customer attrition. As part of your due diligence, it is important to conduct market and user research and follow the best practices to build the best onboarding experience. 

Craft an onboarding process that ensures new customers experience the full value of your product and shows them the steps to take to integrate into your product offerings fully.

How to Build the Best Customer Onboarding Experience

Here are some steps to ensure that your customer onboarding process provides users with the best experience while being compliant and secure from fraud and bad actors.

Digitize manual processes

Digital innovation has transformed the appetites of customers. These days, people expect processes to be digital, enabling them to access necessary products and services from the comfort of a mobile device. Failure to meet these expectations could result in high drop-off rates. Hence, the need to digitize manual processes.

Not only does digitizing onboarding ensure customers get the best experience due to little or no friction, but it also reduces the manual workload for your staff and eliminates the costs that come with manual processes.

Curate an onboarding checklist

A good onboarding process aims to show users how your product solves their problems in the shortest time possible. Excellent onboarding provides the fastest route that shortens the time to discover value.

Checklists and tasks are critical in achieving this, as they give customers a goal to meet and help activate them quickly. When done right, a well-defined checklist helps get users to the ‘Aha! Moment’ of your product. However, checklists tend to perform better if incentives and rewards await users who complete tasks.

Adding progress indicators to the onboarding tasks improves the customer experience, giving them a sense of accomplishment when they finish tasks. 

Personalize the onboarding experience

Leverage your customer’s data to give them a personalized onboarding experience. 

Doing so gives them a sense of ownership, delight, and belonging, which could speed up the customer’s time to value and mean the difference between having loyal customers and them dropping off.

Add identity verification checks to onboarding 

An onboarding flow void of verification checks is a danger to your business, as you run the risk of onboarding bad actors and exposing your platform to fraudulent activities. This danger makes it necessary to verify customers as you onboard through their addresses, identity documents, or other means. 

However, many businesses struggle with balancing KYC and customer experience and end up creating more friction for their customers. A simple solution is to onboard users the right way and with the right tools.

Review and improve your current onboarding process

A good onboarding process is never perfect because customers’ needs, priorities, and expectations are ever-changing. Constantly revisit your onboarding process to fix broken pieces and make updates and improvements. Check your onboarding flow frequently to ensure you always offer your customers a great onboarding experience.

Some Great Onboarding Experiences Worth Studying

While there are steps and best practices you can explore to get onboarding right, you can also glimpse insights and gain inspiration from observing and studying the onboarding procedures of other brands.

These are some of the most effective, seamless, and compliant onboarding experiences we know. Let’s explore and see what makes them effective.

Prospa

Prospa is powering SME businesses and entrepreneurs by providing them with loans and helping them register their businesses and create bank accounts in less than 5 minutes.

Prospa starts with a simple signup and account-creation flow.

After this, users are prompted to choose the type of business account they want to create and to provide the required information.

Prospa verifies the identity of each customer as part of the onboarding process, and they use BVNs to make the verification process seamless. In the background, Prospa leverages Dojah BVN Validation API, which allows them to verify that customers’ details match the data in their BVN.

Upon successful verification, Prospa gives customers instant feedback through their app and by sending an email. Doing so gives the customers a sense of progress and continuity in the onboarding process.

What we like about Prospa’s onboarding process:

1. Prospa provides multiple options for customers to sign up, whether through email addresses or with Google and Apple social logins. Allowing customers to sign up with their preferred method reduces friction and gives them control over the onboarding process.
2. Prospa provides customers with a smooth and seamless verification process by leveraging Dojah BVN Validation service.

OurPass

OurPass helps make payments easy, fast, and secure for businesses and online shoppers via their One Click Checkout and other payment solutions.

OurPass utilizes onboarding screens for product education. The screens educate the user on the benefits of OurPass, and what they can do on the app. 

As part of the signup process, OurPass leverages Dojah OTP Messaging and BVN Validation services to carry out KYC checks and verify their users’ identities. 

Once in the app, users are prompted to carry out their first action, whether funding their wallet, referring a friend, linking a card, or other quick actions. The idea is to help them discover value quickly and immerse them into the platform, which will help drive retention. 

What we like about OurPass’s onboarding process:

1. Their usage of onboarding screens to expose users to the value of their product is a great way to stir anticipation and desire.
2. They ensure that verification checks do not add friction to the onboarding process by leveraging Dojah’s identity verification services.
3. Adding CTAs and quick actions is a great way to drive retention because they help users explore the value of the product quickly. 

CDcare

CDcare is a Nigerian online marketplace that operates with the BNPL model. They make it easier for Nigerians to buy electronic appliances affordably.

The onboarding process starts with product education through some onboarding screens.

An interesting thing about CDcare’s onboarding process is that users are not prompted to sign up after going through the onboarding screens. Rather, they are taken to the main app to check out available products. CDcare only prompts them to sign in or create an account when they try making a purchase. 

CDcare allows users to verify themselves through their BVN, NIN, or phone number as part of their identity verification process. CDcare leverages Dojah’s Lookup NIN, Lookup BVN, and Lookup Phone Number services to verify their users.

What we like about OurPass’s onboarding process:

1. How they use onboarding screens to carry out product education and increase awareness and expectation during the onboarding process.
2. Taking users straight to the main app where they can browse through their products is a great strategy to increase sales and get users to take action immediately.
3. They made their identity verification process more accessible by providing multiple verification options, and they ensured the process was seamless by leveraging Dojah’s identity verification services.

Building a Frictionless Onboarding Experience

There is no one size fits all solution when it comes to creating a safe and secure onboarding process. However, there are proven steps you can deploy to build a pleasant and compliant onboarding experience that is void of friction. A reliable way to excel at this is to build with a proven onboarding and verification provider. 

Dojah is Africa’s first complete end-to-end verification platform for onboarding, compliance, and fraud-check. We are powering trust in Africa’s greatest economies via our identity verification tools. 

Start verifying your users with ease today. Contact us if you have any questions or schedule a demo session.

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