User experience and digital identity verification

Why should you care about user experience (UX) in digital onboarding processes if you want to maximize sales conversions? Well, the pace at which a company onboards new users and its sales conversion rate are two profoundly important success metrics in today’s highly competitive business environment. The company that is fastest in onboarding customers is most likely to be the first to reach global scale.

Yet all too often, a poorly designed UX during the onboarding and identity verification process comes up as a major stumbling block to scaling a company, as it leads to potential customers dropping off. A bad UX can easily become a drag on sales conversion. To convert more customers faster, companies need to make sure that their customer identity verification solution is optimized for sales conversion.

In the race to sign up new customers, competition is fierce. Especially in many new and crowded lines of business such as neo-banking or the sharing economy, companies need to ensure the rapid adoption of their product or service if they want to compete.

Moreover, they know that in the digitized business world, the first company to reach a certain scale unlocks the so-called “first-scaler advantage” and very often ends up dominating the market globally – with the second-biggest company being just an also-ran in terms of market share.

Optimizing Sales conversion is all-important in customer onboarding

That is why conversion rate optimization (CRO) is simply vital. In order to reach these goals, companies need to onboard a greater volume of customers faster than their peers.

That said, stringent identity verification requirements are an additional constraint in many lines of business. For example, neo-banks and telecommunications companies have to fulfill Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) requirements. To verify the identity of their customers, this process can be greatly helped by modern software solutions that undertake this task.

A poorly designed user experience is a major bottleneck to sales conversion

An identity verification solution with a poorly designed user experience can become a major bottleneck in a company’s sales conversion drive. This is because identity verification adds another layer to the sales conversion funnel. And with each additional layer, a potential customer is more likely to abandon the process altogether.

However, verifying their customers’ identity is a legal requirement in many sectors. So what do companies have to do then? The answer is to invest in an identity verification solution that is as user-friendly as possible. This minimizes abandonment rates and concomitantly lifts conversion rates.

UX needs to be optimized to increase conversion rates

Firstly, investing in an easy-to-use software solution that is integrated into the product and that enables companies to sign up customers using any common mobile operating system like Android or iOS is required.

Many legacy companies – particularly those with high KYC requirements such as retail banks and insurance companies – still rely on knowledge-based authentication (KBA) over the telephone, thereby overburdening their employees with verification procedures. This has left sales conversion rates to languish. Those firms, too, need a software solution that automates the process.

How to have a positive impact on conversion rates:

1. Increase sales conversion rates on the customer’s side

It is important to make users aware of the necessity and benefits of an identity verification check, just as it is important to explain to them how this check will be conducted. Taking users by the hand through the process will help a company move them through the conversion funnel. For example, a short video to illustrate the process can help.

A large improvement can also be made by comparatively basic things like providing clear instructions and context to the user, by explaining the rationale behind asking for their ID and a video-selfie. Similarly, providing a progress status on how many steps are still needed to finish the process can also aid users. Likewise, the fewer screens the user has to wade through, the better.

2. Increase sales conversion rates on the company side

Companies should invest in a software that can be easily integrated into their existing business processes, whether these are themselves integrated into a cloud-based or on-premises solution.  This guarantees them a frictionless user experience.

They should also see that the entire verification process is completed within their own application environment so that there is no jump-off to external applications. A benefit of keeping it internal is the possibility to apply all kinds of a company’s own business rules to optimize for conversion, while still keeping the security of the process high.

Furthermore, it makes sound business sense to have users complete the identity verification step after the check-out process and not beforehand.

3. Onboard customers regardless of their hardware specs

The software solution needs to be flexible enough to integrate equally well into the various operating systems used on any of these platforms and be able to work under the technical constraints of any mobile phone or laptop camera.

Likewise, the solution should independently identify and recognize the type of document the user is showing – e.g. a passport, a national ID or a driver’s license – in order to verify him- or herself. This obviates the need for the user to pre-select the document type, which is a step that can easily be confusing for them.

It must also not be put off guard by external factors such as the poor quality of a document photo, a person’s visible age difference between the time the picture on the ID was taken and now, ornaments like glasses, make-up and piercings, or poor lighting conditions.

4. Enhance UX through the most advanced technological solutions

On the technical side, a solution utilizing passive liveness detection, where the user doesn’t need to do anything, provides better results than software using “active liveness detection”. The active liveness problem needs to do perform gestures like turning his or her head or nodding – which can easily be misunderstood or even antagonize the user.

Passive liveness detection, on the other hand, doesn’t require anything more than looking into the camera and the user is done with the verification process in a matter of seconds.

As the process with passive liveness detection is fast and simple, major stumbling blocks toward onboarding the user have been removed. There is no need to take a selfie and upload the picture. A simple point-and-shoot UX makes the process run smoothly. This lowers abandonment rates significantly.

How to make user experience frictionless

PXL Vision’s technology has been built from the ground up to provide the highest degrees of security and automation, with conversion rate optimization in mind. The seamless integration of PXL Vision’s technology with a cloud or on-premise solution ensures a frictionless user experience. Our software solution can be used on any customer device and with any operating system and is well-known for its reliability and security.