Customer Onboarding Redesign

Customer onboarding in invoice finance

Bibby Financial Services is a specialist financial services company. It provides invoice finance to businesses across the UK - advancing money against unpaid invoices, so a business can use cash that is tied up in its sales ledger.

Businesses often turn to invoice finance when they are growing fast and need funding soon. That makes the journey to becoming a customer unusually important. A prospect who is unsure what happens next, or how long it will take, has every reason to look elsewhere - and newer, digital-first lenders were making that easy.

Bibby's onboarding had grown over many years, with different teams building different parts of it at different times. Sales, underwriting, take-on and operations each ran their part with care, but the joins between them were harder to see from the customer's side. Prospects came in through the website, through a business development manager (BDM), or through an introducer, and their experience could vary depending on which door they used. Information gathered at one stage didn't always travel to the next. And during underwriting and verification - the stages where a prospect is waiting for money - there was little for them to see while the work went on.

Bibby described its existing approach as one size fits all, and set up an omni-channel programme to change it.

Designing one onboarding journey across every channel

Our part of the programme was to design the future-state customer journey: from the moment a business first looks for funding to the moment it receives its first payment.

The journey had a second job. Bibby planned to use it as the reference for the rest of the programme - the user experience design, the technical architecture, and the plans of teams across sales, risk, take-on, marketing and IT. Without one agreed view of the journey, each project risked building to its own picture of the customer, and paying for it later in rework.

So the objective was a journey that was:

• Complete - all ten stages, from first impressions to first payment, with every channel in view
• Tested - checked with real prospects and customers before anyone built against it
• Usable - clear enough for the people designing systems and processes to make decisions from it

Building and launching the new portals and processes was Bibby's work, and was not part of this project.

Designing an omni-channel onboarding experience for financial services

We worked with people from every part of Bibby's onboarding journey, in small working groups for each stage, and took three stages through in depth: first impressions, information gathering, and take-on. Four ideas shaped the design. Each applies to any organisation trying to make a complicated process feel like one journey.

Design the journey before the technology

Omni-channel programmes often start with channels: a new portal, live chat, a mobile app. Each one is a reasonable investment. But a customer doesn't experience channels. They experience a journey, and they notice when it breaks - when the portal doesn't know what they told the BDM, or when a phone call contradicts an email.

At Bibby, every stage of the journey was worked through the same way. What would success sound like, in the customer's own words? What problem are we solving at this point? What does the prospect need, and what does Bibby need? Only then: what part should the portal play?

For the underwriting stage, the success statement the group wrote was a customer saying they wished buying a house was this transparent. For signing, it was a customer who wasn't surprised the legal documents were clear, because that's what they'd come to expect.

Working this way gives an organisation a fixed point to design against. Once the experience is agreed, the technology choices become questions with answers: does this feature help the customer at this stage, or not?

Make the waiting visible

The hardest parts of a financial services journey are often the ones the customer can't see. Underwriting, verification and checks happen inside the organisation, and from outside they look like silence. Silence makes people anxious, and anxious prospects chase, repeat themselves, or leave.

Bibby's take-on team saw this most clearly. Late in the journey, they were often the ones resolving gaps in information and handovers, and the people prospects turned to when they weren't sure what was happening. Verification was where the questions came most often. Bibby contacts a prospect's own customers to confirm invoices, and prospects wanted to know what was being said and how long it would take.

The design turned those hidden stages into steps the customer could follow. The customer portal, provisionally called MyBibby, shows five steps to funding: an indicative offer, completing your profile, verification, application, and set-up and first payment. Each step says what's needed and why. A named reviewer gives a date they'll finish by. During verification, the portal shows how many invoices have been checked, and lists any customers Bibby hasn't been able to reach - so the prospect can help move things along.

Behind it, the staff portal gives each BDM a view of every prospect: what's outstanding, what stage they've reached, and where to step in. The prospect keeps one point of contact through to their first payment, when their relationship manager takes over.

When people can see where they are, the organisation no longer has to spend its time telling them.

Decide what the portal does and what needs a person

Digital onboarding can go too far. Put everything through a portal and the relationship goes quiet. Put everything through people and the process slows, and costs more than it needs to.

We used a simple test, built on two questions. Is this interaction mostly about information, or about the relationship? Is it mostly practical, or emotional? Sharing information, explaining how the product works, and simple transactions suit digital channels. Reassurance, complex questions, advice and the emotional side of a funding decision need a person.

Omni-channel, in this design, meant something specific. Customers choose how they deal with Bibby, and every channel gives the same level of experience. Someone who starts online can switch to the phone and carry on from where they stopped. A BDM on a call can send a link so the prospect watches their details go in. An introducer can set up the account for them.

The result is an organisation that puts its people where they make the biggest difference, and gives customers control over the rest.

Design for who's arriving

Treating every prospect the same sounds fair, but it rarely feels fair. Someone who has used invoice finance for years wants speed. Someone new to it needs to understand what they're signing up for before they'll share anything sensitive.

The design asks early whether a prospect is new to invoice finance, and shapes the journey from there. When the concepts were tested, three types of prospect stood out:

• Naive newbies - new to invoice finance and unsure it's right for them: "help me through it"
• Sceptical newbies - sure it could work, unsure about Bibby: "work with me on this"
• Old hats - experienced and focused on a competitive offer: "make it easy for me"

The research also showed that people's comfort with sharing information grows as trust builds. General details about the business come first. Specific figures about their own customers and debts come later. So the design stages its information requests to match, and explains why each one is needed.

Designing for who's arriving lets an organisation be quick with the people who want speed and patient with the people who need support - in the same journey.

A tested future-state journey, ready to build

Bibby came away with a complete model of its future onboarding experience:

• A top-line journey covering all ten stages, with what success looks like at each one
• Five design principles - empowerment, effort, support, simplicity and human - to guide decisions across the programme
• Detailed experience maps for three stages, covering every channel
• Wireframe concepts for both portals, showing how customer and staff views connect

Before any of it was built, an independent research agency tested the concepts with 19 prospects and customers, a mix of experienced and first-time users of invoice finance. Most responses to the MyBibby concept were very positive. People valued having everything in one place and being able to track their progress. Being asked early whether they were new to invoice finance was rated the most useful feature. And most - 58% - said they'd use a combination of online and phone, with the agency concluding that seamless switching between the two could set Bibby apart.

The testing also sharpened the design. Security had to be visible to earn trust. Phone contact needed to stay easy for complex questions. And people wanted flexibility over the face-to-face meeting, including the option to skip it if they knew the product well.

The model was handed over to the teams designing the user experience and technical architecture, and the build that followed was Bibby's own.

Omni-channel onboarding means the same experience through every door

Omni-channel is easy to read as a technology goal: more channels, better connected. That's part of it. But the test of omni-channel is what a customer notices. Do they get the same quality of experience whether they start on the website, on the phone, or through an introducer? Can they move between channels without starting again? Do they always know where they stand?

For a business waiting for funding, the last question matters most. Invoice finance customers are often growing, busy and short of time. Every unexplained wait is a reason to call, to chase, or to try someone else.

Three things made the difference at Bibby, and they apply to any organisation redesigning customer onboarding:

Agree the journey before building the channels. A shared, tested view of the customer's experience gives every project in a programme the same reference, and stops each one building to its own idea of the customer.

Make the inside visible from the outside. The stages a customer can't see are the ones that cause most of the anxiety, and most of the calls. Showing progress, naming people and giving dates turns waiting into something a customer can follow.

Put people where they count. Let digital channels carry the information and the simple tasks, and keep people for reassurance, advice and the moments that feel uncertain.

Designed this way, onboarding feels like the start of a relationship from the first enquiry.

About this work

James Freeman-Gray led the customer experience design for Bibby Financial Services' omni-channel programme, working with teams across the business from first concepts through to customer testing.