How to Deliver a Speedy and Secure Customer Experience With Intellicheck
Customer experience is crucial to your business’s success. It isn’t enough just to know this. You need to be able to deliver the experience your customers expect while balancing all the other considerations that go into running your company.
To provide the right experience for your customers, you can’t take a one-size-fits-all approach. You need to put in the work to determine what your customers want, what you can realistically deliver, and what you can do to meet both needs in a way that will satisfy everyone.
Good Customer Service Takes Balance
One element that tends to be part of a good customer experience is speed. Customers want their services as fast as possible. In fact, according to a survey by Waitwhile, just over two-thirds of Americans experience negative feelings, such as boredom or frustration, when they have to wait in line. A surprising 2015 survey by Fifth Third even found that 96% of Americans would rather burn their mouths on hot food than wait for it to cool.
Still, as powerful as the allure of instant gratification is, it’s not realistic in many contexts. You can’t will elevators or cars in traffic to move faster. Restaurant chefs only have so much control over when food becomes safe to eat, and doctors can’t prescribe the right treatments until they run tests. At first glance, this probably seems like the reality for identity validation, too.
For businesses facing this conundrum, there are three questions that should be asked: How fast can you realistically make your experience, what do you need to give up to get speed, and what can you do to make the wait worth it for customers? While answering the first question is largely a matter of understanding technical concerns, answering the second isn’t always so straightforward. It requires an examination of both the journeys customers take to get to their destinations and an understanding of the value that they’re receiving.
Perhaps the best example of this in action is what you see in theme parks like Disneyland. Disney knows the popularity of its parks can cause long, ride-ruining lines that harm the customer experience, and it knows it’s entirely responsible for making the wait times more tolerable. To keep customers coming back, it needs to reduce the frustrating aspects of their visits as much as possible.
Part of the way Disney handles this is by making the journey itself more entertaining. In many cases, lines are now filled up with different attractions that keep people entertained. Interactive elements, videos, or exciting sights can make the wait seem much shorter than it actually is. Another way is through fast passes. Visitors can choose to come to a ride at a specific time of day in exchange for a significantly shorter wait period. It’s a strategy that helps alleviate line lengths and makes customers happier. While most companies don’t have to deal with this specific problem, the underlying approach to figuring out how to make the journey both pleasant and efficient should be the goal of every business trying to provide the best experience possible for customers. In the identity validation process, an obligatory procedure that most customers would rather skip, this means prioritizing customer engagement without compromising on security.
How Intellicheck Helped a Prominent Jeweler Improve Its ID Validation Process
To drive this point home, consider how we helped a nationwide jewelry retailer increase its security. This company uses identity validation services to protect consumers from identity theft and safeguard itself from fraudulent purchases. It learned pretty quickly that this was a tricky process to get right.
On one hand, if identity validation takes too long, it can result in real customers losing their patience or feeling that they’re being treated with an unacceptable level of distrust. On the other hand, if employees don’t do their proper due diligence, it could result in errors that are harmful both to the company and to real consumers, such as costly purchases made with cards that were stolen by fraudsters with fake IDs. People don’t always understand how poor security hurts the customer experience. In this case, the company’s initial ID validation process was taking too long and failing to consistently deliver the right results. It was the perfect condition for producing unhappy customers. To fix this problem, the company decided to work with Intellicheck, which it now uses for every transaction in all its stores across the nation.
Providing a Better Customer Experience
Your ID validation process can determine whether or not a potential customer uses your service. Unfortunately, both the typical manual process and digital process leave much to be desired.
The Manual Process
This is what you would expect if you were to try to get a drink at a bar or get into a club. You hand someone your ID so it can be visually verified. For maximum accuracy, people checking your ID need to know the type of identification they’re looking at, what each state ID looks like, and the best way to verify each.
Unless they can memorize all of this, bouncers and bartenders often rely on books, which can slow everything down. It’s a process with plenty of room for error and frustration.
The Digital Process
Typically used in online transactions, the digital identity validation process involves uploading pictures of the front and back of your license, which is then delivered to third-party verification services. Already, you’re in a situation that is both cumbersome and filled with potential security vulnerabilities. A high-resolution picture of your license floating on the internet isn’t an ideal situation. Once the license is uploaded, verification happens automatically about 60% of the time. For the rest, it’s kicked to a manual process that can take another day or more. Again, not something any customer will be excited about.
The Intellicheck Process
This is where the Intellicheck process makes a difference. It takes into account both the need for accuracy and the need for speed. Intellicheck scans the barcode on the back of the license and uses its structure for verification. Each state has a specific format it uses with security structures that verify the barcode. This ID validation approach makes it possible for Intellicheck to automatically render an accurate verdict virtually every time.
The Intellicheck process can validate an ID, ensure that the person holding the ID is who they say they are, and even determine if doing business with a particular person is a risky proposition — all in a matter of moments. It’s the best of both worlds for you and your customers.
Delivering the best customer experience doesn’t have to mean sacrificing security or compromising other parts of your business. With the right partners and the right balance, you can provide what customers want and still get what you need.
