Giving forms the web 2.0 treatment

An Industry Insight feature with Adobe

How interactive forms are resigning tedious tasks of the past to the bin. Prelini Chiechi, Head of Enterprise Marketing at Adobe, explains.

“It's easy to see forms as something more akin to the Industrial Revolution than the Digital Revolution”
-Prelini Chiechi, Adobe Systems Europe

Web 2.0 technologies, no better highlighted than by the iGoogle effect, are driving a complete overhaul of customer facing systems and interfaces. Customers are now being wowed by personalised online portals that include dashboards, calculators, customised offers, virtual assistants and 3D product configurators. So the venerable form might seem like an odd place to find this emerging technology making an impact.

However, completing a form is highly likely to figure in a customers’ first experience of an organisation and, borrowing some of the technology and thinking that makes the latest generation of websites so engaging, forms have undergone something of a facelift over the last couple of years. Further, by combining engaging customer experience with process automation, this next generation interactive form perfectly fits the requirements of the current economic climate.

Forms have been used to collect information since the earliest civilised societies and constitute the bedrock of many crucial processes within almost all the major industries, particularly the financial services industry. Account opening forms, payment request forms, standing order forms, product application forms, claim forms. The list is almost endless. Customers might have the occasional whinge about completing them – tax return forms spring to mind – but there’s no denying that a very high percentage of people are comfortable with them and understand how to use them. This is not something that could be said so confidently about the current generation of online banking services. 

In today’s world, the paper form is undoubtedly outdated. They’re inefficient because trying to cater for a vast variety of people with differing circumstances means that very few people need to fill out every section. They’re slow. Even when they can be completed electronically they often need to be printed and posted back to allow for wet signatures. Even with rapid development of scanners and optical character recognition (OCR) software, they place a huge manual processing burden on the back office. They’re also a primarily paper-based process at a point in time when reducing paper usage is key environmental priority – a damning charge sheet.
 
Interactive forms, however, offer the best of both worlds. The engaging experience offered by web 2.0 technology with the instant familiarity of a form. Envisage being emailed an insurance claim form following a motoring accident that comes pre-populated with your name, address and policy number. The form can not only be completed online but also offline and can be digitally signed and returned electronically without the need for printing. What if the form was generated on the fly, automatically adding the appropriate sections based on your answers so you no longer have to skip large sections that are not relevant? Further, when it comes to trying explain what part of the car has been damaged you’re offered an interactive 3D model of a car so you can click on the appropriate panels and are asked what’s happened to them as you do. While the blank space where you usually attempt to draw how the accident happens becomes an interactive 2D space with cars, arrows and traffic features that can be moved around to show what happened.  

Perhaps more significantly, given the economic climate, once submitted to the originating organisation the interactive form can be validated and its information transferred into back-end IT systems without manual intervention or the need for scanners or OCR software. Any exceptions can be automatically flagged back with the customer for resolution. All without the need to alter existing back-end systems and workflows via a software layer that sits across and integrates with these systems. This insurance form exists today.

In all the excitement generated by the web, it’s easy to see forms as something more akin to the Industrial Revolution than the Digital Revolution. Yet, with the current economic climate driving a desire to both increase efficiency and better service customers, interactive forms offer a technology that is a very much in tune with the requirements of the modern world. Offering a combination of proven process and cutting-edge technology, more efficient processes and improved customer experiences, reduced operational costs and reduced carbon footprint.

Prelini Chiechi is responsible for overseeing Adobe’s enterprise strategy and positioning in the UK & Ireland. With over 14 years of business marketing experience, Prelini has held senior Global, EMEA and Asia Pacific marketing positions with leading, blue chip technology and financial services organisations.