So you’re tackling fast onboarding, what are your plans to stop fast offboarding?

Fast-onboarding of new customers is easy to measure but not easy to do; automated processes, machine learning, deep integration have helped many organisations reduce onboarding times, acquisition cost and complexity. That’s good!

It’s a process instigated by the customer and, needless to say, the less friction the better the customer experience. It is the first silver bullet on your customer journey.

Offboarding is completely different, this is not about formal disengagement … it is about when your customer chooses not to use your service anymore. It is harder to measure but much easier to make happen.

An example, my customer signs-up to join my swift payment service, they easily navigate through my KYC (know-your-customer) questions, integrate their bank card or ApplePay/AndroidPay and they do their first transaction — awesome! I see them again a month later with their next transaction followed by another the next week. All good so far….

And then they don’t use the service again. At some stage I need to ask the questions;

• what should I have expected from them?

• do they still need my service?

• are they using a different service? why?

• and eventually… are they still my customer or have they, effectively, offboarded?

Do I have the data to answer these questions … can I analyse details of their demographic and social media activity to understand their usage patterns; can I see when they looked at starting a transaction and didn’t complete it (did my application frustrate them?); did they interact with chat-bots or support pages and then not transact; were offers targeted to them based upon AI and behaviour or were they subjected to carpet-bomb marketing; …

“ The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” Lao Tzu

The customer journey begins with onboarding but to travel a thousand miles technology has a huge part to play as an enabler of friction-less service; appropriate offerings, faultless transactions and customer partnership.

A great customer relationship means that if a customer takes their business elsewhere they feel disloyal in the same way as if they had snubbed a date with a friend. This loyalty to your service and brand cannot be demanded, today’s landscape makes it more fickle and fragile than ever before, customers can offboard in a jiffy and they don’t need to ask your permission or use your expensive onboarding app to do so.

Data science, cloud computing and deep integration will provide the bedrock technical capabilities alongside awesome marketing, brand focus and outstanding customer service. These are the crucial ingredients if your business strategy is to retain and develop customer relationships.

In conclusion… gather the data now; build a data strategy and weave this with your technology and business strategy to create an evolving operating model that will make your customers want to be retained and grow their engagement with you.

The alternative… they’ll offboard as easily and quickly as they onboarded, and you’ll never know.