Article
by Nortal
Customer Onboarding ABC: The Art of Crafting Your Services for Your Customers in a thoughtful and Comfortable Way
Customer onboarding is more than just introducing a new user to your product—it’s as important as security and privacy from your company’s perspective. Estonia has been using innovative solutions for decades, offering important lessons on how seamless onboarding can shape customer success. While many countries still require physical documentation to verify identity at businesses, Estonia has transformed how customers engage with services, blending convenience with cutting-edge technology.
One of the key aspects of Estonia’s success is how it eliminates the need for physical documents for interacting with businesses after initial onboarding. Picture this: instead of carrying around paperwork to verify your identity at a bank, you simply use your biometric data or digital ID. Estonia’s e-residency program is a prime example, allowing users worldwide to securely access services without setting foot in the country. This shift demonstrates how onboarding can be done without friction, freeing customers from cumbersome procedures.
The lesson here is that customer onboarding should aim to remove barriers, not create them. For example, in Estonia, it is used as a principle called “once-only”. The once-only principle is an e-government concept originating from Estonia that aims to ensure that citizens, institutions, and companies only must provide certain standard information to the authorities and administrations once. User onboarding should follow a similar principle: it should require strong identification procedure only once to enable seamless digital identity verifications for subsequent interactions.
Whether you’re purchasing a phone or signing up for a service, the experience should feel frictionless. Estonia’s success lies in its digital-first approach, using remote identity verification to allow for smooth transactions and reducing the hassle of physical paperwork. This creates a seamless, secure, and comfortable onboarding experience that is miles ahead of traditional, document-heavy processes.
Frictionless Onboarding with Digital ID and Biometrics
Traditional methods of identity verification, which require customers to submit physical documents or make in-person visits, are frustrating. This can result in a high drop-off rate during the onboarding process.
Customers can sign up for a bank account or activate a telecom service simply by using a secure digital ID. For example, remote identity verification solutions can authenticate users within seconds, helping to create an effortless yet secure onboarding experience for both customers and businesses.
AI-Driven Fraud Prevention
While ease of use is critical, so is security, especially in industries like banking and telecom where fraud is a major concern. Digital trust tools, powered by AI and machine learning, can help detect and prevent fraud in real-time during the onboarding process.
These systems can flag potentially fraudulent activities, ensuring that legitimate customers enjoy a smooth experience while bad actors are filtered out before they ever gain access to services.
Strong digital identification solutions can significantly decrease the risk of fraud and make attacks, such as SIM swapping and account recovery voice phishing unreasonably difficult.
Trust Through Transparent Data Handling
In the post-GDPR era, customers expect companies to handle their data responsibly. For both banks and telcos, ensuring data privacy is not only a legal obligation but a trust-building exercise. Digital trust solutions that emphasize secure data handling and transparency can reassure customers that their personal information is safe.
Nortal has worked on designing onboarding processes with a strong focus on privacy. Clear explanations of data usage and storage, along with controls for data-sharing preferences, have led to notable improvements in trust and retention rates.
Customer-Centric Onboarding Through Digital Trust
Estonia’s digital success story offers an inspiring model for what’s possible when organizations prioritize ease and innovation. For banks and telcos, the lesson is clear: digital trust is not just about reducing friction, but about creating a deeper connection with customers, built on security and confidence. If there are limitations due to legislation, offer customers a “once-only” framework and build your onboarding process around it removing friction after the onboarding. With Nortal’s help, customer onboarding can become a powerful tool to drive growth, build loyalty, and ensure long-term success.
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