Why secure onboarding matters for businesses

While it’s essential to create a customer-centric onboarding process that makes your new users feel welcomed, validated, and valued, this process is also an opportunity to learn more about your customers and better understand their needs.

Every secure onboarding experience must be mutually beneficial to two audiences: your customers and your business. Your customers want to trust their personal information is safe, while at the same time, your business needs to ensure it builds a seamless process that delights and protects new and existing users.

What does this look like in practice? Here are a few of the benefits onboarding programs award customers and businesses when properly executed:

Plus, prioritizing security at sign-up can save your business time and money down the line. Many tech giants like Twitter and Paypal have learned just how expensive identifying and deleting fake user accounts can be. Avoid the costly clean up by prioritizing identity verification at sign-up and taking a proactive, rather than reactive, approach to fraud.

That’s just a taste of how a secure onboarding process can benefit both your company and customers. Below, you’ll find even more reasons why businesses should prioritize and invest in a secure customer onboarding experience.

Any customer onboarding experience prioritizes security for one main reason: so a business can ensure that an end-user is legitimate and trustworthy before allowing them access to its platform. But trust goes both ways. While your business needs to ensure your new sign-ups and future customer transactions are legitimate, your users need to ensure your business will keep their data safe today and in the future.

Here’s what that looks like in more detail:

For your business, onboarding allows you to collect a user’s contact information and verify that they are who they say they are. This information can help protect your business and users at various stages of the customer journey—by reducing sign-up fraud, preventing user-account takeovers, and protecting future customers transactions. That way, you can trust every new, legitimate user that tries to do business with you and not worry about compromising the security of your existing customer base.

On the other hand, your customers need to trust that your business will keep their personal information safe. Your business can help put them at ease by introducing advanced user security measures at sign-up, like password complexity requirements, two-factor authentication (2FA) requirements, recovery phone numbers or email addresses, etc. Even allowing your customers to specify how they want to hear from your brand can increase their confidence in your business. After all, they want to ensure anytime they engage with a call, text, or email from your brand, they aren’t falling victim to a phishing or spoofing scam.

That said, any secure onboarding process needs balance. Your business must have enough security processes and procedures in place to keep out bad actors, but not too many where legitimate users become frustrated. Once your company achieves this balance and establishes mutual trust with your users, you’ll be well on your way to building a long and prosperous relationship with your customers.

Digital identity verification—whether via document verification or email/phone number lookup—allows your business to determine if a user is trustworthy and take preemptive action if needed. Odds are your legitimate users won’t even notice this step since you can do it behind the scenes in some cases. After uploading their documents or providing their contact information, users will progress seamlessly to the next step in your sign-up experience.

For example, instead of running the risk of having a customer get frustrated by a one-time passcode (OTP) or Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA), your business can instead send them a push authentication through your mobile app and have them approve or deny their login attempt with one click. Your customers can access their accounts with less friction, while your business can ensure its platform remains secure.

When your business has a reliable way to verify new user identities and ensure that your users’ devices and data aren't at risk, you can rest easy knowing your business can continue to grow responsibly.

You might also want to reconsider your business’ use of CAPTCHAs and knowledge-based questions during your onboarding process, too. While these methods can verify user identities, they can also be a source of user frustration and contribute to your new user drop-off rates. Instead, using verification methods that don’t open the door for human error can help you create a more seamless and secure onboarding process. When your users can create an account in just a few minutes—or in some cases, a few clicks—you’ll see improved new user retention and sign-up completion rates.

You don’t have to choose between having a secure onboarding process and an exceptional UX. Now, you can have both.

While passwords alone aren't enough to protect your customer accounts, encouraging users to set up 2FA can help your business and users keep their information safe. With a robust API like Verify, your business can have customers verify they are who they say they are via their preferred channel of choice: SMS, voice, email, push, time-based one-time password (TOTP), and WhatsApp. Now, your customers can seamlessly and instantly validate their identity on a channel of their choosing. Plus, they’ll gain peace of mind knowing they’ve partnered with a business doing everything it can to secure their credentials and data throughout their journey.

At the heart of every great CX lies convenience, personalization, and timeliness. To combine these 3 characteristics and please your customers, you need to know where and how they want to hear from your brand. For that reason, your business should not only ask customers what their preferred communication channel(s) is/are but also confirm their language preferences. This establishes where your customers should anticipate your messages and allows your brand to send them in their preferred language so that they don’t think your call, text, or email is spam.

Knowing your customers’ communication preferences helps you understand what kind of messaging elicits the best response from them and allows you to build more seamless relationships with your users. Here’s an example of how knowing your customers’ preferences can help you prioritize account security: