For a fast-growing crypto company, demonstrating trustworthiness is key to building a solid reputation that attracts new users. A report by GIACT found out those who fell victim to an account take over (ATO) attack, 29% moved to a new bank service and 24% moved the account to a new entity. This means that securing customers’ digital identities must be a key part of customer success strategy. This begins at client or customer onboarding and moves through the customer journey.
If your company is in crypto, handling digital assets like NFTs, or in FinTech, introducing identity verification is probably on the roadmap for your company’s KYC and compliance program. Identity verification used to be seen as checklist item for compliance. However, incorporating KYC best practices during customer onboarding is also a cornerstone for fraud prevention strategy is key to retaining customers. Making sure your customer or client success team is equipped to communicate the benefits of identity verification will be key to growth. Here are five ways to smooth out the implementation of KYC for compliance and security and at the same time maintain customer success at the highest level.
1. Show empathy to customers.
Introducing new security or compliance measures means that customer success teams have to adapt quickly to address the concerns of customers. Your customers could be doing online identity verification for the first time or generally concerned about how their personally identifiable information (PII) is handled. The more informed your customer success team is, the better they can handle these situations.
Because customer success or customer experience (CX) teams are at the forefront of dealing with frustrated customers, understanding how the identity verification works for your company will help your team address concerns and build trust. Making sure your team has tried your new KYC solution will help them work with customers to succeed through a verification and clearly state the value of KYC verification.
2. Explain why KYC verification is necessary at client onboarding
If you operate in the FinTech or crypto industry, the chances are that your company has to meet some AML requirements. To do that, you have to know your customer to make cyber risk management more effective. Having a KYC process is not just a checklist to fill and forget. Work with other departments to educate your CX team on why identity verification appears for certain actions so that they can explain them, whether to the average consumer or for client onboarding. These might go beyond onboarding to include biometric authentication during large transactions and updating account details to meet AML reporting requirements or security measures to fight money laundering, fraud, and identity theft. For example, if a customer gives away their password due to social engineering or a phishing, a service that requires them to verify themselves with a quick face scan before a large transaction stops attackers from stealing all customer’s money and makes it easier to recover the account by verifying their identity with their biometrics.
3. Help customers understand how KYC verification works
To reassure your users and build a solid customer success strategy, let your customers know what they can expect at every step of the verification and provide tips for success. Typically, the basic steps include the following:
- Taking a photo of a document such as a national ID or a driving license.
- Following the instructions to make a video selfie that provides a face match with the ID document and is a liveness detection test for security
They may need to provide additional documents, such as a Proof of Address or insurance card depending on your industry. You may also need to explain why a verification has been retriggered, such as if a document is expired or if your fraud team has spotted suspicious activity. For your CX team to explain these requirements, work with your security department or the product managers who implemented the identity verification solution (likely a third-party company like Passbase).
4. Educate customers on security and privacy benefits
Keeping account data with transactional records separately from customers’ PII has many benefits, and it’s important that your clients understand that. In this case, using a third-party identity verification solution helps separate your customers’ PII from their account on your platform. This makes it harder for fraudsters to steal PII or to fake an identity.
Also help your customers understand the privacy benefits. Because a third-party identity verification solution like Passbase only focuses on verifying the individual, they do not have any information on the reasons behind why your customer wants to perform an identity verification. Their information about who they are is separated from what they do and secures their privacy and to ensure that their data is not used by advertisers that have access to large platforms that provide Single Sign On (SSO) services.
5. Support users to secure their accounts
Your CX team does not have to stop at managing frustrated customers. Your team can easily reduce friction for your customers in different ways. Below are some ways to help:
- Give specific instructions and tips to pass the verification faster (such as ensuring that the room is bright enough or to use a stable WiFi connection).
- Provide additional security best practices such as using passwords managers that can generate complicated random passwords.
- Explain that smart friction is designed to deter bad actors and protect customers’ digital identities.
Also, collect customer feedback and forward it to product teams so as to close the information loop. Your CX team can manage cases better by working with product teams to improve customer success and get your company to optimize conversion goals even after you have implemented identity verification.
You can improve the happiness of your customers and your CX team by treating KYC as a tool that can help you improve your customers’ security and therefore, increase the retention ratio. Effective identity verification helps different stakeholder departments to align on your customer experience strategy.
Empathy towards your customers can get you halfway. The other half is staying up-to-date with customer experience strategy best practices, and proactively sharing this knowledge with other teams can help your company move towards achieving its goals in a much more efficient way.
Passbase provides a convenient way for businesses in the new digital economy, from FinTech and crypto to ecommerce and mobility, to build a KYC program with integrated identity verification. You begin testing the Passbase API, SDKs for iOS, Android, and web today.
To see how identity verification can work for your business today, sign up with Passbase today or book a demo.
