High dropout rates for application and onboarding processes could indicate that your fraud controls are causing unwanted friction for your customers. Make their journeys easier and increase your conversion rates with a joined-up fraud approach that creates trusted identities and a single customer view.
According to Experian research, 42% of millennials would transact more online if there weren’t so many security hurdles to overcome (dropping to 30% for 35s and older). This means fraud solutions that provide frictionless experiences for customers can significantly increase customer engagement and, potentially, revenues as well.
But as incidences of fraud and data breaches continue to increase, how can you effectively protect your customers without damaging their experience? And how can you make sure that the onboarding process is as smooth and frictionless as possible for the genuine customers that want to do business with you?
The first step is to fully understand the impact of your existing fraud controls on your customer journeys. To help you do that, we’ve put together this checklist of all the common causes of friction in customer journeys. If any of them apply to you, it could be time to rethink your fraud strategy:
1.Disjointed onboarding processes caused by unconnected technologies
If you work with systems that are not fully integrated with one another, you may have to cross reference customers’ information manually to authenticate them. In the worst cases, you may even end up asking for their information more than once if they want to access products managed by different departments or areas of your business.
The best way to overcome these issues is to integrate systems and databases across your organisation. That way, you can achieve a single, trusted view of your customers, which is exactly what you need to deliver fast, accurate services – including fraud, authentication and security checks – with the least possible friction in the journey.
2. Compromised fraud protection due to incomplete or inaccurate data
Many organisations use outdated systems to capture customer data. That means there may be no way for you to record email addresses, social media accounts, or even mobile phone numbers. If your systems were implemented before mobile and digital communications became ever more common, you may consider upgrading so you can collect more data about your customers, meet their needs better and, crucially, maximise the reference points you have to prevent fraud – with no friction for customers.
3.Fragmented customer experiences across different contact channels
Fraudsters hop between traditional online and mobile channels all the time, just like genuine customers do. So if your call centre, online account, mobile apps and other channels are not properly connected, you may find it difficult to spot and respond to potential fraud before it’s too late.
In this scenario, channel-specific fraud checks no longer work. Instead, you need a centralised, multi-layered fraud system that detects potential fraud across all channels, however customers choose to contact you.
4.Conflicting departmental priorities slowing progress
Different departments and teams in your company inevitably have different priorities and ways of measuring performance. This can create barriers between fraud controls and broader business initiatives – such as user experience (UX) or marketing initiatives.
To overcome this issue, you need greater understanding and alignment between your departments and teams to close any security loopholes. Inter-departmental collaboration also means you can identify friction in customer journeys and take joint action to make things better.
5. Difficulty identifying and authenticating customers due to unconnected data
Many organisations still struggle to connect data into a single system to provide an accurate view of customers with 72% struggling to connect data into a single system according the . This means you have to implement onerous fraud controls that potentially disrupt hundreds of genuine customers to find one single incidence of fraud.
To compound the challenge, organisations often hold subtly different data about the same customers in different systems or departments. In a classic example, a bank may have a customer’s name in a different format on their current account, as compared to their mortgage – making it hard to identify and authenticate them.
To effectively protect against fraud, while also minimising friction in your customer journeys, consider integrating data across your organisation to achieve a single customer view.
How can we help?
Experian is a pioneer in helping organisations overcome the challenges of cumbersome, onerous fraud prevention controls that negatively impact customer experiences. Our multi-layered, plug-and-play fraud platform can help you join up fraud systems and customer data, and to automate key checks to minimise fraud risks and deliver faster, smoother customer journeys.
To find out how Experian can help you deliver frictionless fraud protection for your customers, please view our frictionless fraud prevention paper, or email us gtmcontactus@experian.com.
[1] Experian Global Fraud Report, 2018