The process of opening a new account digitally is a critical part of any credit union's success. It serves as the gateway to an array of features and benefits, and a successful experience can increase member satisfaction, boost loyalty, and set the foundation for positive long-term relationships. As such, it is vital for credit unions to optimize their digital new account opening processes to ensure they remain up to date with changing technology and member preferences, continually offering the best possible experience.

But how can your credit union strengthen its processes? To improve upon everything you've already worked hard to build, here are a few core best practices you can follow.

Improve Your Digital New Account Processes Right NOW!

1) Work on Your Implementation Plan

First, develop a plan to bring your digital new account process to life. What does this tool do, why does it do it, and how effective is it at doing those things? These straightforward questions are what you need to answer when building an implementation plan.

In addition to the technical side of the equation, you'll also need to identify any legal hurdles as well when talking about the type of personal financial information that is to be collected and stored.

2) Identify the Friction Points

If you look at your existing account opening process, what are some of the things that members absolutely hate? Likewise, if you look at the digital new account processes that some of your competitors are using, what are the features and functions that just don't work as well as you think they could?

These are all friction points and each one is a potential opportunity for a member to abandon the process. Address them during development and don't give someone an excuse to look elsewhere for the services they seek.

3) Actively Look for Flaws

Whenever you're talking about something as malleable as digital services for credit unions, you can't afford to just wait for flaws to be discovered. You have to actively go looking for them, which means going through testing and quality assurance processes on a regular basis.

It gives you a chance to catch and address a small problem today before it potentially becomes a much more complicated (and damaging) one down the road.

4) Focus on the Time Required for Success

Success in terms of improving your digital new account process isn't going to happen overnight. Instead, you need to make small, strategic changes and pay attention to what they tell you in terms of the user experience.

Start with basic member experience metrics like conversion rate, process success rate, abandonment rate, and more. All of these numbers will clue you into the bigger picture of what is really going on whenever you make changes and you can adapt accordingly.

5) Optimize for the Multichannel Experience

Finally, your digital new account process shouldn't operate ideally for one platform. Don't just optimize for desktop and laptop computers. Optimize for mobile phones, too, as those are what the majority of your members will be using. More than that, optimize for ALL mobile phones--from iPhone to Android and everything in between.

Ultimately, improving the quality of your credit union's digital new account creation process is something you have to be proactive about. Never assume you've "done enough" to get this process to where it needs to be. Instead, always look inward--reflect on the member experience (especially when it comes to onboarding and ask yourself what is working and, more importantly, what isn't. Use that insight to double down on the former and get rid of the latter as often as you're capable of.

At FLEX, we've recently authored a guide that outlines additional best practices you can use to accomplish precisely that. To download it and find out more, click the button below.