Digital onboarding is the process of introducing and integrating a new customer, employee, or user to a digital platform or service. This process typically involves creating an account, verifying identity, and providing relevant information to complete the registration process.
Digital onboarding can be a crucial step in ensuring that new customers, employees, or users have a positive experience with the digital platform or service. A smooth and efficient onboarding process can help reduce abandonment rates and increase user retention.
In this post, we’ll take a look at the benefits, key components, and future of digital onboarding as well as a case study with a company that has successfully implemented digital onboarding. Let's get into it.
Benefits of digital onboarding
Digital onboarding offers several benefits for businesses, including:
Improved User Experience
Digital onboarding can streamline the registration process and eliminate the need for in-person visits or paper-based applications, which can lead to a more convenient and seamless user experience.
Increased Efficiency
Digital onboarding can reduce manual effort and shorten the time it takes to onboard new customers, employees, or users. This can lead to increased productivity and cost savings for businesses.
Cost Savings
Digital onboarding can help businesses save money by reducing the need for physical infrastructure, paper-based processes, and manual labor.
Reduced Risk of Fraud
Digital onboarding can incorporate advanced security measures such as biometric authentication, identity verification, and fraud detection to minimize the risk of fraud and protect businesses from financial losses.
Greater Flexibility
Digital onboarding allows users to onboard from anywhere, at any time, using any device. This can help businesses reach a wider audience and provide greater flexibility to users.
Overall, digital onboarding can help businesses improve customer experience, increase operational efficiency, reduce costs, and mitigate risk.
Key components of digital onboarding
The key components of digital onboarding can vary depending on the type of business or service, but generally include the following:
1. Account Creation
This involves collecting basic user information such as name and email address to create an account. The step is often referred to as signup.
2. Identity Verification
This involves verifying the user's identity using various methods such as user authentication, document verification, or knowledge-based authentication.
3. Compliance Checks
Depending on the industry, compliance checks may be required to ensure that the user meets certain legal or regulatory requirements. For example, financial services may need to comply with know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) regulations.
4. Data Collection
This involves collecting additional information from the user, such as address, date of birth, or occupation. This information may be required for regulatory compliance or to provide personalized services to the user.
5. Multi-factor Authentication
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) involves using multiple methods of authentication, such as a password and biometric verification, to increase security.
Overall, the key components of digital onboarding are designed to create a smooth and secure onboarding experience for users while also meeting legal and regulatory requirements.
The future of digital onboarding
As web applications and Software as a Service (SaaS) products continue to dominate the market, digital onboarding will play an increasingly vital role in user adoption and retention. The following trends and developments are expected to influence the future of digital onboarding for web apps and SaaS products:
Gamification
Gamifying the onboarding process can boost user engagement and make learning new platforms more enjoyable. By incorporating elements such as rewards, progress tracking, and interactive tutorials, businesses can motivate users to explore and master their products more efficiently.
Personalization
SaaS companies will increasingly leverage data-driven insights to deliver personalized onboarding experiences tailored to each user's preferences, skill level, and goals. This may involve customizing the onboarding flow, offering context-specific guidance, and providing personalized product recommendations.
No-Code/Low-Code Solutions
As no-code and low-code platforms gain traction, businesses will be able to create and customize digital onboarding experiences without requiring extensive coding skills and using tools like Feathery. This will enable greater flexibility and experimentation, allowing companies to optimize their onboarding processes based on user feedback and analytics.
Integration with Third-Party Tools
Seamless integration with popular productivity, collaboration, and communication tools will become increasingly important for SaaS products. Streamlining the onboarding process by connecting users' existing tools and accounts will reduce friction and facilitate a smoother transition to the new platform.
Data Privacy and Security
With growing concerns about data privacy and security, SaaS providers will need to prioritize transparent and secure data handling during the onboarding process. This includes obtaining clear user consent, using encryption, and adhering to international data protection standards such as GDPR and CCPA.
In summary, the future of digital onboarding for web apps and SaaS products will be characterized by increased personalization, gamification, seamless integrations, and a focus on data privacy and security. By embracing these trends, businesses can offer more engaging, user-friendly onboarding experiences that promote long-term customer success and loyalty.
Digital onboarding case study: Tango
Tango is a remote-first startup with 200K users across six continents, helping customers create beautiful how-to guides with screenshots in seconds.
Within a few weeks of adopting Feathery, Tango was able to build and launch a new onboarding flow featuring conditional logic that powers a personalized product experience for users, brand-native look and feel using themes, and helpful elements like a progress bar.
Since deploying their Feathery-built flow, Tango has reduced onboarding time-to-completion from 1 minute and 48 seconds to 41 seconds—a 72% improvement—while maintaining the same number of questions as the original form. Tango was also able to save 500+ developers hours over the course of six months by eliminating the need for engineering resources.
Conclusion
Overall, digital onboarding is an important part of the digital transformation of many industries and can help companies improve customer experience and increase operational efficiency.
Ready to build a digital onboarding flow? Get started with our simple onboarding flow template or SaaS signup and onboarding flow template.
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