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.