Customer Experience (CX) is not a new concept. It’s been around long enough for some analysts to predict that Customer Experience is “out” and Customer Effort (CE) is “in” (and both have an acronym — the pinnacle of an established idea). What’s critical for companies to realize is that optimizing experience and minimizing effort are inextricably bound — and are both essential to retaining business in 2024.
Inflation, the increased cost of consumer goods and reduced buying power have created consumers that are not only concerned with how much they are spending but who they are spending it with. Today, they choose you. But you are only ever one or two negative experiences — maybe a missed investment opportunity or an expired insurance policy — away from them leaving.
What Do Customers Expect?
Your customers expect their interactions with you to mirror the interactions they have with Amazon or Apple: a fast, simple experience that delivers what they want quickly. The challenge for companies in heavily regulated industries is finding a way to do that and collect 10x more information, involve 10x more approvers and comply with internal and external regulations. Ouch.
The good news (finally) is that there are enterprise technologies built for this exact purpose. Enterprise forms solutions give companies a way to create intelligent, fully digital experiences for even the most complex business processes — and here are some of the biggest reasons to think about forms automation to improve CX.
Top 3 CX Benefits of Enterprise Forms Automation
1. No More “Empty” Interactions — Nearly every servicing or onboarding process involves collecting information and documentation — and (unfortunately) a lot of back and forth between you and the “customer.” Enterprise forms solutions are digital extensions of your core systems. They create “mobile first” experiences, automatically present translated versions, prefill and validate data instantly, collect supporting documents digitally and much more. These capabilities result in fewer, more meaningful, more impactful interactions. In other words, less time wasted and less effort for your customers and your employees. To underscore why that matters, “Only 9% of customers who had low-effort experiences were likely to change vendors or merchants, compared to 96% who had high-effort service interactions,” according to Gartner (Source: 4 Actions to Improve Customer Loyalty by Reducing Customer Effort, January 10, 2024)
2. Faster Outcomes That Exceed Expectations — Gone are the days of customers accepting a 30-day window until they can start working with an advisor on their investment portfolio or find out if their vehicle theft claim was approved (not reimbursed — that’s another 15+ days). If they can get almost any consumable good delivered to their house within 24 hours, why can’t they get the answer to [insert any onboarding or servicing request here] in the same amount of time? Companies that can do that stand out in a major way from their competitors.
3. Better Employee Experience Delivers Better Customer Experience — In a tight labor market, finding and retaining skilled staff is a challenge for companies. According to Adobe’s State of Work report, 32% of employees left their job because of poor technology and 49% said they were likely to leave if bad tech gets in their way. Giving employees modern tools that enable them to deliver outcomes quickly — whether it’s business analysts creating processes themselves, in just a few hours, or customer service representatives on the phone, fulfilling a service request and being able to give an update before they hang up — allows them to have impact and eliminates the need for call-backs. Employees feel valued and empowered to serve, and that directly influences their customer interactions.
There are plenty of other reasons companies should completely rethink their approach to long-standing, mission-critical onboarding and servicing processes. The hot topics of structured data intake, maximum tech utilization, improved time to market, operational efficiency and business ownership are all in the mix — and they all have downstream effects on CX. But, for brevity’s sake, the three highlighted are the three that the customer experiences directly.
The Corporate Reality Check
What an amazing thing if companies could snap their corporate fingers and poof — the hundreds of form-related business processes they manage just became fully automated, digital, secure experiences. And what if IT didn’t need to build or maintain them? That’s living the digital transformation dream.
Creating these experiences is possible. Making what is complicated today simple is possible. Using a centralized technology to streamline data intake and manage digital data collection processes is possible. All it requires is a different approach and an understanding that just because an internal process is “complex” or “sophisticated” doesn’t mean the solution is. In many cases, the ease and simplicity of the solution will surprise you.
Sally Schulte is the Senior Product Marketing Director at Smart Communications, a customer communications management technology leader focused on helping businesses engage in more meaningful customer conversations and transforming traditional forms-based processes into intelligent, conversational user experiences.
