Deposit accounts make up roughly 9% of a retail bank’s assets and 60% of the profits, and 10% of these customers often drive 90% of the value. Additionally, customers are the most at risk for attrition in the first 60 days of the relationship, and the attrition rate for new customers is double the rate of customers with tenure greater than 6 months. Couple this with the fact that 75% of all cross-sell activity occurs within the first 120 days of the relationship and the importance of paying special attention to on-boarding high value customers carefully and effectively during the first 120 days as a customer becomes clear.

Yet customer onboarding lags behind other business processes in both the quality of customer experience and costs. Lack of attention towards customer onboarding results in customers abandoning the application process, loss of customers, regulatory fines and damage to the corporate brand. Best practices have addressed these issues through improved transaction management with enterprise content management (ECM) technologies, the use of rich Internet applications, adoption of e-signatures, better distributed capture, red flag compliance and a transition to a client-centric onboarding strategy. Applying these best practices — especially during a deep economic downturn — can help business process and apps professionals save money and even help push green IT forward.

And the simple act of calling or sending a letter to new customers to thank them for their business and explain the features of the product they just purchased can go a long way in ensuring their satisfaction. In many aspects, developing a customer relationship isn’t very different from developing a personal relationship. There has to be some mutual trust, mutual benefit, and some degree of engagement.