Over $2 trillion will be spent on digital transformation this year - a large part of it fueled by growth, regulations and customer-centric initiatives.
Forbes highlighted that companies with revenues of over $1 billion a year earned an additional $700 million by investing in customer experience.
Be it e-commerce, retail, online banking or a SaaS product - conversions can be improved by tracking leads better, analyzing sign-ups on your website, and understanding how users move from a free plan to a paid one. A large part of this hinges knowing who your customers are.
User identification, and identity verification is not just a nice-to-have as a differentiation from competitors, but is increasingly necessary to mitigate risk and prevent fraudulent activities. With the growing frequency and size of data breaches, identity theft and account takeovers, incorporating a secure identity verification solution into your product or services now protects your users and your business.
What’s the fastest way to make this happen? With the technology available today, shortening the identity verification process is the counter-intuitive answer.
Simplifying the process may sound alarming, especially for companies that need to fulfill regulatory requirements for customer due diligence or data security. Until recent years, this has meant that many services have extended the time taken to onboard users and lengthened the checkout process, security features such as one-time passwords (OTPs), and reCAPTCHAs for liveness detection screens amongst others, resulting in user drop-offs and abandoned carts.
At the same time, increasing AML regulatory and compliance requirements means that most online businesses handling online transactions may need to do customer due diligence. The recent PSD2 directive in the EU is an example of increasing regulation on handling online payments that could result in loss of sales for businesses that don’t adopt more secure KYC solutions, while keeping the same convenience now expected of online payments.
Different industries come with different requirements - be it legal, user experience-driven or compliance-based, a large portion of it include controllable factors that your business can carefully sift through when enabling identity verification on your platform.
With a robust KYC solution in place using the latest biometric authentication choices such as facial recognition, enterprises have the ability to tackle their sales conversion and drop-off rates, without compromising on digital security and data management. Here are five ways the right identity verification provider will help you drive better conversions.
1. Reduce identity verification friction for your users
The more steps there are in your sales funnel, the more time-consuming it gets for the customer - giving them ample opportunity to drop off from the process. For example, you need to verify a new user’s driving license, and that they are the individual they claim to be, in a matter of seconds and not hours before they can use your car share platform. If you are selling alcohol online, you need to perform age verification. In both cases, users expect to be able to complete their registration or checkout process on the spot, not get an e-mail confirmation later.
Passbase’s identity verification platform solves the customer retention challenge by authenticating the true identity of the user in a couple of seconds, making the process quick, seamless and accurate. The technology is supported by NIST-certified facial recognition and liveness detection, backed by official ID documents from over 150 countries.
Below is a live video of a user submitting a document verification and video selfie to complete their identity verification in under one minute.
2. Data protection and security - A critical aspect in building your clients’ trust
When it comes to providing data - particularly sensitive information - there needs to be ample trust between your organization and a potential client. Your end users will need to be certain that data that’s necessary for the transaction will only be collected and this will not be misused or compromised at any other point.
Currently, user onboarding flows rarely provide new users with an explanation of what information is required, why it is necessary, and what is being done with the data that’s collected. Users who do not trust your service and data policies will not continue. To improve the UX experience, build trust with your users by including text explaining what you will collect, for what reasons, and how their data is handled.
With Passbase’s zero-knowledge sharing architecture, the client’s data is secured by enabling ownership over their data. The customer has control over what data to share and who to share it with. Without compromising on data protection and security and customers can exercise control over their data.
3. Sending an alert if the verification process was not successful
Another UX improvement to retain your customers who may drop out from the ID verification process is to provide prompts and notifications. If they are stuck on a step, such as their document being rejected, give them hints. Documents cannot be authenticated if they are cut off or blurry, so you can add prompts such as “Please include the entire document in the frame” or “Please make sure all the text is focused”. If they have closed the app and stopped the process, send them an e-mail telling them how close they are to completing the onboarding process and outline the remaining steps.
4. Establishing trust in the verification workflow
With growing public concern over data handling and increasing data security regulations like GDPR and PSD2, you can differentiate your business by sharing about your identity verification process and other important client-facing steps. This builds trust with your customers and the public.
5. Tapping into a biometric authentication after onboarding
After a new user has completed their ID verification and successfully registered their account, you can make use of biometric authentication to give them a more convenient way to login in the future. Be sure to explain to them the security benefits of using biometric authentication over a traditional text-based password that can be easily forgotten or stolen. This effectively eliminates any time-consuming or outdated identity verification processes and instead gives customers control over their data, improving conversion rates. You can book a demo for our biometric authentication feature.
In addition to enabling a strong identity verification solution for your business, our team will guide you through the workflow. You can book a demo, explore our developer docs, or create an account now.
