Key takeaways: Stripe B2B customer onboarding
Stripe, the payment solution giant, has only been around for 11 years as this article is written. But since being founded by Irish brothers John and Patrick Collison, the company has acquired millions of customers globally and are currently valued at a staggering 95 billion dollars.
We took a look at the process of becoming a customer of Stripe, and here are some key takeaways from our deep dive.
Free account
Low threshold & Clear Value Prop
To start your buyers journey at Stripe, all you need is a name, email address and password of your choice, which provides a nice, low threshold to get going as a user. No agreements, terms, business details or personal details (other than the previously mentioned).
In addition the value propositions are clearly expressed on the left-hand side of the screen, catching the eye straight away. This block of information gives you a great idea of who Stripe is for, what you get when you sign up, and some social proof of "millions of businesses" already using Stripe.
"Stripe account creation"
Instant access to evaluate
When signed up for your free account, you instantly get access to everything you need to evaluate the service which is a great plus. So far so good right? Let’s move on to the paid subscription onboarding process.
Paid subscription
Manual input fields
Once in the registration process of activating our account, getting access to live data, we found ourselves in a lot of information required to be entered manually. Input fields for business details, as well as representative and ownership details, creates frustration and risks of churn or abandonment.
This part of the onboarding could quite easily be replaced by automatic data collection and field population, which in turn would not only improve customer experience but customer data quality as well. Manual data entries regarding beneficial owners for example, run a high risk of incorrect data, and is difficult to verify even when correctly entered.
"Manual input requirements"
Progress indication
Another issue we found in this part of the registration is that is takes a lot longer than expected. A lot of the data points could be collected automatically, but a progress indicator would also be beneficial in our opinion, as a lack of predictability is obvious in this case.
Companylization
In a B2B setting, a tailored or personalized onboarding - we like to call it companylization - is something that we quite rarely find. So is there any room for "companylization" in Stripes customer onboarding process? We believe there is. They could tailor their offer, buyer journey, terms and agreements and much more based on internal and external data. Sandbox usage data from the free account, business details such as size, revenue and industry and more could be used in this case to present a specific, tailored offer to the user.
Climate contribution request
At the end of the customer onboarding process, which was quite time-consuming to be honest, Stripe poses a question regarding contributing to a good cause. However, this gesture of good-will is more frustrating than positive, as the customer experience of this registration hasn't been as smooth as it could be.
Summary
1. It's easy to get free access with a low threshold for account creation, and once you’re in you’ll find all you need to evaluate the service.
2. Secondly, it’s a bit time-consuming to go through the flow of becoming a paid subscriber, with lots of manual data entry required.
3. Finally, the manual data entries and the actual data required by the user, creates a high risk of poor data quality and not being able to verify the data.
To be crystal clear, we love Stripe and use their services ourselves at Roaring. This is solely an objective view of their customer onboarding process, what works well today and what room there are for improvements.
