Increase digital bank account opening

2. Discover the 'why' behind customer abandonment 

Once you’ve pinpointed where customers are getting stuck, the next step is to figure out why. This is where testing with real customers or prospects comes in. Have them go through the account opening process, paying close attention to the areas where friction occurs. Ask participants to think out loud as they complete tasks—sharing their thoughts, reactions, and any frustrations they encounter along the way.

• Record sessions: Capture participants’ screens, voices, and expressions to see the process through their eyes.
• Analyze behavior and feedback: Use these insights to understand challenges and brainstorm targeted solutions.

This approach goes beyond just numbers and analytics—it helps you understand the why behind high abandonment rates and low conversions. By connecting directly with customers at these critical moments, you’ll uncover what’s working, what’s not, and the changes that could make a big difference. 

3. Prototype solutions with actionable insights

Once you’ve identified the "where" and "why" of customer pain points, focus on creating solutions. Use insights from customer videos to identify specific issues and gather actionable ideas. Share these findings with your team, then brainstorm potential fixes together.

With initial ideas in hand, start to sketch or prototype potential solutions. 

• Start simple: Sketch or create low-fidelity prototypes. These don’t need to be fully functional—simple concepts work just fine.
• Get feedback early:  Share your ideas with customers early in the process. Schedule interviews to present concepts, guide participants, and gather their feedback.
• Test and refine: Use self-guided tests to let customers interact with your designs on their own. Collect feedback to see what works and what needs improvement.

By iterating with real customer input, you can refine your solutions and ensure they meet user expectations. Validating ideas early helps you fix issues before development begins, saving time and resources. This "measure twice, cut once" approach sets your designs up for success.

4. Find your winner with customer preference testing

When evaluating multiple design ideas, customer preference testing makes it easy to gather feedback on all options in a single session. By leveraging participant insights, you can refine designs and identify the option(s) that best meet customer needs—ensuring your solution delivers the best possible experience.

Preference testing helps narrow down the strongest approaches, giving your team a clear direction for further development. After identifying the top designs, you can conduct A/B tests to determine which solution resonates most with customers.

5. Optimize content with human insight

Don’t forget about the content during the optimization process—words play a critical role in guiding customers through the account opening process. Clear, engaging, and intuitive messaging supports customers and reduces confusion, making their journey smoother and more enjoyable.

When your team identifies pain points, use these insights to refine your existing content or introduce new elements that enhance the experience. Thoughtful adjustments can transform frustration into satisfaction.

• Test calls to action: Experiment with wording, placement, and tone to discover what resonates most and drives higher engagement.
• Streamline instructions: Simplify complex steps with concise language or tooltips, making the process easier to follow.
• Personalize messaging: Tailor content to individual users by addressing their needs or referencing their past interactions for a more relevant and connected experience.

By prioritizing content optimization, you’ll build trust, reduce drop-offs, and create an experience that delights your customers.

Generate new ideas to lead the market

Sometimes, optimizing existing processes isn’t enough—you need bold, new ideas to stand out. By leveraging the innovation process, you can use real customer feedback to inspire creative incentives for new account sign-ups, design cutting-edge digital features, or develop fresh financial product offerings. These insights help you craft solutions that resonate deeply with customers, elevate the digital account opening experience, and position your bank as a forward-thinking industry leader.

1. Discover new opportunities through customer needs

Innovation starts with understanding your customers. Engage directly with people to uncover unmet needs and identify opportunities to transform the digital account opening process or create compelling offers and marketing for new account sign-ups.

• Talk to current customers: Focus on those who faced challenges or needed extra support during the process.
• Connect with drop-offs: Reach out to people who abandoned the account opening process to understand what caused them to leave and what could have kept them engaged.
• Engage potential customers: Speak with individuals who have yet to open an account to understand what features, incentives, or offerings would encourage them to choose your bank.

Leveraging these insights, you can develop forward-thinking features like AI-powered onboarding (e.g., AI chatbots, dynamic form fills, personalized offers, etc.), personalized application flows, or exclusive sign-up bonuses. These enhancements not only improve the customer experience but also help differentiate your bank and drive new account growth.

2. Gain competitive intelligence to drive innovation

Competitive intelligence is a valuable way to spark ideas and improve your digital account opening process, as well as the incentives, marketing, and offerings that attract and retain customers. By learning directly from people who use your competitors’ offerings, you can identify what’s working, where the gaps are, and what truly influences their decisions—giving you the insights to stand out.

Think broadly when identifying competitors. Include not just direct competitors like traditional banks or financial institutions but also online-only financial institutions and other financial products, such as payment apps or investment platforms. These alternatives often influence customer expectations, especially as the definition of "checking" or "investing" accounts evolves.

With a clear understanding of competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, your team can design a standout account opening experience, launch innovative digital features, and design compelling incentives and marketing materials. This approach empowers you to deliver exceptional experiences that not only meet but exceed customer expectations—helping you win and retain their loyalty in an increasingly competitive landscape.

3. Analyze and share insights

Once you’ve gathered feedback, the next step is to analyze and summarize your findings. Create short clips or highlight reels of key moments to distill the most valuable insights, making them easier to understand, share, and act on. This approach ensures your team can quickly focus on what matters most and drive meaningful improvements.

Share your findings with relevant teams to ensure everyone has a clear understanding of customer needs and can work collaboratively to drive new ideas and improvements. Customer feedback often reveals clear opportunities for innovation and offers actionable guidance for refining your processes or products.

To foster future collaborative brainstorming, consider hosting a video watch party, where teams review feedback and discuss potential solutions. Here’s how to make it effective:

• Select videos: Choose clips that highlight key challenges or significant moments.
• Invite cross-functional teams: Include stakeholders like product managers, designers, and marketers to bring diverse perspectives.
• Facilitate discussions: Pause to discuss recurring themes, unexpected insights, and potential improvements.
• Document and prioritize: Capture key takeaways and outline actionable next steps.

This approach helps align teams around customer insights, fostering empathy by bringing the customer’s voice into the conversation. It ensures solutions are grounded in real user needs and keeps everyone working toward the same goals.

4. Brainstorm ideas and iterate with confidence

Start by brainstorming and sketching initial concepts grounded in customer needs, competitive insights, and your innovation goals. Whether designing new features, enhancing content, or crafting compelling messaging and creative assets, basing your ideas on these insights ensures they address key opportunities and resonate with your audience.

Adopting an iterative, feedback-driven approach allows you to test and refine not only digital experiences but also content, creative elements, and messaging. For example:

• Test headlines or taglines to identify which resonate most with customers.
• Experiment with creative assets, such as imagery or videos, to determine which visuals drive the most engagement.
• Validate content clarity by ensuring your messaging is clear, relevant, and meets customer expectations.

By incorporating customer feedback throughout the process, you can fine-tune your approach and confidently deliver solutions—whether they’re functional prototypes or campaign concepts—that stand out in a competitive market.

For more details on refining solutions, see the Prototype solutions with actionable insights section.

5. Benchmark for high-quality digital experiences 

Benchmarking your digital account opening process allows you to assess how it measures up against competitors and your internal goals. It’s especially valuable when designing new experiences, as it sets clear performance standards for prototypes before they move into development. With benchmarks in place, teams can accelerate project timelines, focus on the features that matter most to customers, and confidently advance designs.

Start by benchmarking both your current account opening process and your competitors’ offerings. Focus on metrics that evaluate usability, customer satisfaction, and overall effectiveness to understand your standing and set meaningful improvement goals.

For usability, track metrics such as:

• Task success rate: Percentage of users who successfully complete tasks (e.g., submitting an account application).
• Error rate: Frequency of mistakes users make during the process.
• Time on task: Average time it takes to complete the account creation process.
• Navigation efficiency: How easily users move through the experience, measured as actual steps taken vs. the ideal path.

For customer satisfaction, monitor metrics like:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): How likely users are to recommend the experience.
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Immediate satisfaction with specific interactions or features.

Once you’ve established your benchmarking goals, test your prototype against these standards. This approach sets a threshold to ensure your designs meet usability and satisfaction criteria before moving into development. Benchmarking provides data-driven insights that help your team identify what’s working and what still needs refinement.

By achieving your benchmarking goals, you support both innovation and profitability, all while enhancing your reputation for delivering exceptional digital experiences.

Metrics and success indicators

Tracking and continuously refining the digital account opening experience is key to long-term success. Establishing and monitoring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)—such as conversion rates, abandonment rates, and CSAT scores—helps teams measure the effectiveness of their onboarding process and demonstrate how customer insights drive meaningful improvements.

By leveraging these insights and regularly monitoring key metrics, digital teams can create a customer-first experience that adapts to evolving expectations, ensuring continued relevance and success.

Why monitoring metrics matters

• Monitor trends: Regularly tracking KPIs uncovers patterns, such as dips in conversion rates or increases in CSAT scores. These trends highlight the success of recent improvements or signal areas that need attention.
• Align CX with business value: Linking customer-focused changes to measurable business outcomes demonstrates the tangible impact of listening to customers. It reinforces how optimizing customer experiences drives business success.
• Showcase your team’s impact: Sharing metrics and success stories showcases your team’s contributions and highlights the importance of ongoing, customer-centric innovation. Tracking these improvements underscores your commitment to delivering exceptional results.

By establishing KPIs and committing to ongoing analysis, your team can proactively evolve the account opening experience, making informed adjustments that resonate with customers, drive higher conversions, and showcase your commitment to a premier digital experience and measurable business success.

Customer success stories

Here are companies that dramatically improved their new account opening through human insights.

Banco Sabadell 

Transforming account opening with customer insights and benchmarking to achieve 50% of new accounts are completed online.

Banco Sabadell, aiming to deliver Spain's best digital banking experience, recently transformed its account opening process to be fully online, now accounting for 50% of new accounts. Leveraging UserTesting, the bank ran over 40 tests to refine the digital signup experience, ensuring it met high usability and satisfaction standards measured by the proprietary QXscore. This rigorous approach allowed Banco Sabadell to transition from requiring in-branch account sign-ups to providing a streamlined online option, improving efficiency and aligning with customer needs. By prioritizing features that enhance customer experience, Banco Sabadell has set a strong standard for digital innovation in banking.

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T. Rowe Price

Significantly reducing drop-off rates by addressing customer expectations for information early in the account opening process.

T. Rowe Price grappled with a significant challenge: a 37% drop-off rate in their online account setup process. Using UserTesting’s self-guided tests, they rapidly identified the root causes—customers expected more upfront information before beginning the process. By implementing adjustments based on these real-time insights, T. Rowe Price transformed the experience, significantly reducing drop-offs and building trust in their digital platform. The results were immediate—the drop-off rate closed rapidly after the changes went live, reinforcing customer confidence in their digital platform.

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