Background
The client designed, built, and developed in-house online gambling and casino games. At the time, they were updating their registration service in-line with governmental policies for financial services, such as (KYC) "Know Your Customer".
To achieve this the company introduced a new form of user identity validation that would offer more reliable answers during registration. This would eventually eliminate the need for users to submit additional proof of ID in case user verification failed during registration.
The Problem
The ID check would happen at the point of user registration (on form submit). The handshake with the new third-party identity check server could take from 3 to 30 seconds. But when the 3rd-party check fails, the company cannot disclose much information about the reason for incomplete registration, and there is no existing way of supporting the customer. This results in a loss of trust between stakeholders and service and loss of potential customers.
Identity verification and KYC procedures can be slow, expensive, and clunky. This means that user experience can suffer as different establishments may require varying details and users have to submit their data over and over. Not only does this pose a security risk as users offer up sensitive data to different sites, but the slow onboarding and constant error messages cause users to drop out of applications. The higher demand for digital gambling services means that more and more KYC checks are being submitted. This leads to a huge backlog of applications for verifications, with some KYC approvals taking more than a few days to complete, which is understandably bad news for our users.
The Challenge
To design a strategy for error notifications when the ID check fails. This needed to inform the user of the error, without disclosing much information; assuring the user that help and support will look into the issue for them.