Businesses have been moving towards a digital future for some time now, and the onset of the pandemic has further accelerated the pace. COVID-19 has put businesses under pressure to provide a customer-centric digital experience. Embracing artificial intelligence and data analytics has helped businesses from across industry verticals to provide a better customer experience by streamlining their operations. Customer onboarding is one of the many operations that have been transformed by AI. Imagine a customer trying to use your services for the first time and finding the process to be worrisome and a hassle. This could hamper the onboarding process for the customer and create a detrimental impact on the business. Considering that the onboarding system is the first experience that a customer has with your business, it is important to ensure that the system is well oiled and running smoothly. For that to happen, businesses need to integrate AI and ML into their onboarding process. Keep on reading to know how AI-based digital onboarding can revolutionize your business.

Why AI-Powered Digital Customer Onboarding?

Studies have shown that the finance industry witnesses a 15%-20% increase in overall onboarding costs due to the several challenges faced by the existing manual onboarding process. Some of the challenges faced by businesses who do not have a digital onboarding system in place are as follows:

  • Loss of Revenue
  • High Operational Costs
  • Extended Onboarding Process

To address these challenges and meet the increasing customer expectations, businesses are implementing operational processes powered by AI. These process improvements lead to improved customer satisfaction and retention and reduced onboarding time and costs. Let us take a look at some of the benefits enjoyed by businesses that opt for digital onboarding.

  • Faster Onboarding: The customer onboarding process provides customers with an insight into how their future experiences with the business would be. AI assistants can help provide a seamless experience by responding faster and automating the journey to help the customers get started easier. They can handle the entire onboarding process and also engage with the customers who have left the process mid-way and remind them to continue with it.
  • Enhanced Customer Experience: The main reason why businesses are opting to upgrade their onboarding process is to experience better customer retention rates and higher customer satisfaction. AI-powered onboarding processes help in providing an onboarding experience that is flexible enough to meet changing client requirements and expectations. Some of the features that enable this are multi-channel support, error deflection, real-time progress reporting, and seamless workflow allocation and management.
  • Lowered Cost of Compliance: Compliance is one of the most expensive components of business due to the ever-changing regulations. Intelligent automation helps satisfy compliance requirements for preventing cyber threats. By improving regulatory compliance, businesses can experience a lowered risk of fines. Thus with AI, businesses can maintain compliance while controlling costs at the same time.
  • Intelligent Automation: AI helps reduce the time required to perform labor-intensive tasks by automating them. However, their benefits do not end with that. Over time, the AI assistants can quickly learn and become smarter to perform and manage more tasks. By handling more and more customer interactions, the AI assistants become more efficient in understanding the customer’s needs and responding to them the right way. Thus they can be trained to handle more complex tasks and save both time and money.

The popular adage ‘first impression is the best impression’ holds true as research suggests that humans are bound to form an impression of a person within the first few seconds of their interaction with them. In the existing challenging business environment, businesses need to make a great first impression in the minds of their customers. Furthermore, the pandemic and the consequent lockdown has challenged businesses to compete with the emerging competition and meet the expectations of their tech-savvy customers. AI-powered digital onboarding optimizes the entire process and helps create a first impression that results in long-lasting customer relationships. AI in onboarding is no longer a choice and has become more of a necessity, and businesses that leverage it can continue to stay relevant and competitive while improving revenue and reducing risks.

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