Make a Customer-and Business-Friendly Move to Digital Self-Service
In financial services, almost every relationship and interaction starts with a form. Only a few months ago, a customer may well have found themselves sitting in a branch office, armed with a ballpoint pen and a clipboard of papers to fill out and sign. Whether you were opening a retail or commercial account, applying for an auto loan, requesting a credit line increase, or acquiring a mortgage for a new office building – the pen and paper were, more than likely, your tools of choice.
Once you’d scribbled your signature on the final line, the form would go through various steps of keying, scanning, faxing, validating, reviewing, and decisioning. Weeks later, you’d receive a generic welcome packet in the post or an impersonal notice that the auto loan requested would cover a Jetta, not a Jag.
But, with the 2020 global pandemic, the world has hit reset. The new normal requires financial services to accelerate a digital transformation that otherwise might have taken years. According to GlobalData, key changes to the financial services industry include:
- Applications for personal loans and new mortgages will drop and loan approvals will tighten due to COVID-19.
- But applications will rise for savings accounts, credit limit increases, and overdraft extensions.
- In addition, banks are preparing applications for new government loans, like the UK’s Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS).
One other trend underlies all the rest. To initiate each new financial services transaction, the forms and signatures required will now be digital.
Satisfy self-service preferences
In recent decades, the retail and travel industries have raised customer expectations by providing exceptional digital experiences. To an extent, financial services firms have followed – for example, many banks at least offer the convenience of mobile deposits.
But customers want more:
- 88% of consumers expect brands to possess an online self-service portal. [Statista]
- 30% of people in the UK own five or more connected devices. [Statista]
- Customers will quickly abandon a brand if they’re unhappy – 70% of millennials and 68% of Gen Z say it takes only one bad experience. [Medallia/Ipsos: Customer Experience Tipping Point Study, June 2018]
To satisfy your customers, you need a seamless, multi-channel, digital option for every encounter they have with you. That includes enrolment, onboarding, communications, and servicing, and all the forms and signatures they require. Forms themselves must be well-designed, responsive, pre-populated with information, and enable customers to start a form on one device and complete it on another. After a customer submits a form, you need a way to digitise the back-end process and workflow, automating some tasks and alerting individuals or teams when manual intervention is required. Finally, you must secure the document and audit any future changes.
This is tough. For financial services firms, the challenges of digitising forms and the back-end process at scale can be daunting. You face too many forms, sometimes hundreds of thousands. Using IT resources, it would take far too much time to modernise even a portion of the stockpile. Moreover, the IT process would prove far too expensive to scale. And you must also integrate workflows with multiple legacy systems.
That’s why we’re excited to offer a way to help speed your digital migration in the new normal. Adobe has a forms solution that’s as good for your customers as it is foryour business.
Score a win-win with digital forms
Adobe Experience Manager Forms provides a fast, cost-effective way to create dynamic, digital forms at scale. You can automate processing workflows to support an even better business as usual. As IDC reports, you can achieve benefits that put the sluggish world of paper forms to shame:
- 56% faster time to update forms and documents.
- 64% higher productivity for teams.
- 61% faster onboarding of new customers.
Take a look at how two financial services firms – a bank and insurance company – are using the solution to upgrade their customer experiences, catapult conversion, and shrink costs for forms and processing.
Investitionsbank Berlin: Cut real estate loan processing time in half – and deliver the loan to the customer in 10 days instead of 60
Investitionsbank Berlin aimed to achieve a paperless, self-service loan application process that eliminated browser incompatibilities and manual data validation. The process also needed to integrate with existing back-end systems, such as SAP, SharePoint, and CRM.
The bank combined 12 separate form processes into one self-service, mobile-friendly digital form. By adapting dynamically to customer needs, the forms provide only relevant information and questions. A centralised system administers forms and integrates to back-end systems. Standardising forms reduces the risk of errors.
The result: In addition to shortened loan processing time, the bank reduced form creation time from half a day to five minutes, successfully placing more than 50 forms online in less than a year.
Huk-Coburg Insurance: Shortened forms release cycles from two weeks to two minutes
Huk-Coburg wanted to accelerate introduction of new applications based on market requirements. But the firm struggled to scale digital applications across micro-websites and devices. Costs were skyrocketing for IT to manage different platforms and build forms for different devices.
The team needed to digitally transform and unify forms and processes across channels. Re-usable, responsive templates allowed delivery of forms across screen sizes. Marketers and salespeople can now build and publish form pages with drag-and-drop simplicity in real time. The logic embedded in each form fragment helps ensure no form goes live without approval. Automated workflows support seamless data transfer to and from backend systems, with data processing tailored to the company’s business units.
The upshot: Huk-Coburg achieved excellent ROI by accelerating processes and reducing the risk of errors, enabling fast response to new market requirements while safeguarding quality.
Get ready for the new normal
Modernising forms and signatures is an integral part of lifting customer experience and accelerating digital transformation in regulated industries like financial services. Adobe provides a customer- and business-friendly solution to update and make the most of forms in the new normal. Those who hadn’t already made the shift to digital must contend with additional challenges now – but it’s not too late to double down and set up your business for success.
Discover a more intelligent way to use forms and connect to your customers with Adobe Experience Manager Forms.