Why do so many great brands lose new customers at the first hurdle?

By Georg Bartels, Senior Sales Manager, Anyline

This Vendor View is sponsored by Anyline

Why do so many great brands lose new customers at the first hurdle?

They say you should never judge a book by its cover.

But in our age of instant everything, first impressions have never mattered more. When it comes to choosing a new telecom provider, most consumers will make their ‘buy or bye!’ decision in only a few minutes.

Yet in spite of the huge innovations in customer offerings and services in recent years, many great telecom brands still lose potential customers at the first hurdle because of a tedious and time-consuming onboarding process.

Registration is the first chance to shine and create a lasting impression that will give customers confidence in your brand. By enabling customers to scan their IDs with their phone camera, leading brands are making this process simple, safe and swift.

Here are the key advantages it brings:

Eliminating Manual Data Entry Errors

No one is perfect, and we all make mistakes now and again. But there are few things more frustrating than filling in an online form, only to get the big red ‘Error!’ icon on screen. At best, mistakes like these cost customers time and effort, and at worst, mean they are registered incorrectly and need to call a helpline.

By integrating ID scanning into your app or website, you can eliminate human error from your registration, saving new customers stress and frayed nerves.

Skeptical about accuracy? Join my webinar to see how it works in action every day for leading brands.

Reducing Abandonment Rates

How many times have you opened a browser with the intention of buying something, only to get halfway through before you are distracted or bored? More often than not, we drift away from the page, and our chance of finishing the purchase diminishes with every minute.

Looking briefly toward the world of hospitality, we can see the huge cost of customer abandonment. According to one study last year, the average abandonment for online bookings was 77% – more than three quarters of possible sales!

Lengthy manual processes are the culprit. But compared to typing in information, scanning ID data with a phone or computer camera is up to 20 times faster.

In Kenya, this innovation is a huge advantage for Safaricom. Rather than having to enter information manually, customers can register new SIM cards in seconds by scanning their IDs to verify their identity.

Data Protection and GDPR

Customers place a significant amount of trust in their providers when they give access to their personal data, and it’s our duty to protect it at all costs. Lax security measures can spell disaster for the reputation of any business.

So how can you give customers the assurance that their data is being protected and handled correctly during your customer onboarding process? Mobile data capture, specifically with Anyline OCR, is completed entirely on the customers device, meaning that no private data ever touches a third party server. Whether onboarding via web or an application, the data provided is completely safe and secure to GDPR standards.

Easier System Integration

The final advantage of mobile ID scanning isn’t even visible to your end-users, but makes all the difference behind the scenes.

Industry-leading OCR providers design their software development kits (SDK) with ease of integration in mind. If you are looking for a scanning solution, be sure it will be platform agnostic and can work on boh apps and websites for the maximum convenience of your technical team.

For example, at Anyline, we have developed an JavaScript solution for web browsers, which can be added in only a few lines of code and be up and running within a few minutes!

Back to the bookshelf

It’s safe to say that few industries have moved faster than telecoms in the last decade. But just like we would never wrap a first-edition of Moby Dick in a dusty old booksleeve, neither should an onerous onboarding turn new customers away from your brand.

If you want to hear how leading telecom providers like Swisscom are taking advantage of mobile ID scanning on their apps and websites, try it for yourself by downloading the Anyline demo app and join me for my webinar on digital onboarding technology for mobile network operators.