- Growth & Innovation
To retain commercial customers, focus on perpetual onboarding
- The trend favoring quicker customer onboarding isn’t always best practice. Instead, design an adaptable onboarding experience for the long term.
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High-profile bank failures of 2023 left some businesses reassessing limiting banking relationships to a single institution. In fact, CFOs ranked deposit diversification as one of their top five risk management strategies.
What does that mean for banks? Sure, it’s an opportunity to gain new commercial customers. But what matters most isn’t gaining customers – it’s retaining them long term.
The onboarding experience can play a crucial role here: it sets the tone for every new relationship and can lay the groundwork for deeper engagement. But most banks direct onboarding efforts to the first 90 days or so, and some industry experts are pushing for an even shorter timeframe. That’s potentially a big mistake.
While efficient onboarding speeds up time to revenue, the reality is that practically every customer will have questions beyond those first few months. And new queries could crop up for months or years with changes to the customer’s personnel, business needs and strategies.
To keep commercial customers around, banks should design an adaptable onboarding experience for the long term. I call that perpetual onboarding.
Let’s examine why commercial customers need perpetual onboarding and four tips to build a high-impact program.
Imagine a new mid-sized business customer going through the standard onboarding process for your bank’s payroll service. After a quick introduction, the company’s HR and finance team believes they’ve got a firm enough handle on the service to move forward.
But maybe the team has questions about your platform near the end of the first month and has disbursement hiccups several months into the relationship. When roles change at the customer, it means a new set of contacts with varying levels of experience.
Your onboarding experience needs to account for these eventualities. Customers don’t always know what they’ll need help with upfront. Internal factors (like promotions, new hires, etc.) can adjust or even reset the level of experience individual contacts have with your bank. If your onboarding process only helps customers in those first 90 days, they might feel left to fend for themselves – and your relationship could start to sour.
A perpetual onboarding experience solves these problems. It emphasizes long-term education not tied to a fixed moment in time. And it can significantly impact your customers’ ability to learn and retain knowledge about your bank’s products and services. In the following few sections, we’ll share four tips to make perpetual onboarding work at your bank.
Many banks take a firehose approach to onboarding, throwing lengthy explainers and documentation at new customers to get them up and running as quickly as possible.
But most people learn best by seeing how things work in context. An HR leader might read your full payroll manual on day one, but they may only grasp the ins and outs of your platform once they’ve tinkered around with it for themselves. As they get to know your technology, the highest-value education comes from content embedded in the service.
By anchoring your educational content in specific contexts, you can put helpful information where customers expect it – and where they need it most. That makes it easier to access and retain long-term.
Within each educational context, providing self-service tools that account for different learning styles and knowledge levels is essential. Some folks only need a quick rundown of your services – maybe they’re short on time or have used your bank’s services in previous roles. Others might learn best from detailed explanations of every service and product.
With multiple self-service resources, you can reach customers in whichever way they learn best. I suggest using…
As you roll out each resource, ask new customers about what’s working and what’s falling flat so you can make continuous improvements.
Self-service tools can do a lot of educational legwork. But one of the hardest parts of perpetual onboarding is knowing when customers’ needs will likely change – and when it could be an excellent time to reach out with helpful content.
Customers may sometimes value a regular refresher (for example, wire transfer training or guidance related to updated regulations). But there are also more irregular “trigger events” to consider, like if a contact gets promoted or changes teams.
With robust data management practices, you can track customers’ needs to strike the right engagement cadence.
For instance, if customers infrequently ask questions about wire transfers, you might send them refreshers annually. You can monitor critical contacts’ LinkedIn information for promotion or new teams, which could signal it’s time to send them relevant onboarding materials. This way, you can ensure your bank never misses a beat in customers’ onboarding experiences.
When you change your onboarding program, you must also adjust how you measure its success. Instead of confirming, for example, that your account rep asked a new customer in the first 30 days if they have any questions, find ways to measure how well customers understand your bank – and how much they’re using your products and services.
By changing your onboarding KPIs, you can incentivize your staff to continuously respond to customers’ needs instead of checking off boxes early in the onboarding process. The result is a more satisfying long-term experience for your new commercial customers.
In a literal sense, onboarding involves getting customers up to speed on your products and services. But deriving value from onboarding isn’t a matter of training – it’s a matter of relationship building. And the strongest relationships are built slowly and carefully over time.
With perpetual onboarding experience, you can provide the long-term, high-touch support that commercial customers value most. It’s one of the most powerful ways to make every relationship last.
Young Pham is Chief Strategy Officer at CI&T.
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