The Era of Smart Forms: Transforming Data Collection
By Sally Schulte, Senior Product Marketing Director at Smart Communications
In today’s data driven world, efficient, accurate data collection allows your business to deliver modern, easy interactions—and faster outcomes—for mission critical business processes. That’s why organizations are turning to forms technology that allow them to approach the data collection process in a more sophisticated, customer-friendly way.
In this post, we’ll share how businesses like yours are accomplishing this in the healthcare, financial services, and insurance industries.
What Are Smart Forms?
Unlike PDFs or paper-based forms, smart forms are dynamic, interactive, intelligent—and highly secure. They go many steps further than basic digital forms, leveraging business rules, data integrations, and approval workflows to build an end-to-end digital data collection process. Looking at the benefits of this, they are creating internal efficiencies, reducing invalid or incorrect data coming in, and preventing bottlenecks downstream.
The Shortcomings of Traditional Forms
Traditional forms are plagued with inherent limitations that hinder effective data collection. These shortcomings include:
1. Manual Data Entry and Information Security Risks. Conventional forms rely heavily on time-consuming manual data entry into databases and spreadsheets—introducing information security risks, errors, delays, inefficiencies and an inability to validate information as it is collected.
2. Low Value Interactions. Traditional forms do not offer interactive experiences and often result in follow-up calls or emails for additional information—missing an opportunity to personalize an experience and minimize effort for end users.
3. Poor Integration. Traditional forms often operate in isolation and are unable to share information with relevant core systems, third-party applications, and enterprise automation technologies. This hinders data processing and downstream decision-making.
4. Negative User Experience. Cumbersome interfaces and rigid structures contribute to poor user experiences, leading to user frustration and form abandonment. In fact, our latest Benchmark study found that 54% of people will abandon a forms process if it is too difficult to navigate.
The Advantages of Smart Forms
Smart forms offer a myriad of benefits that address and eliminate the shortcomings of forms and the manual processes behind them. They include:
Improved Data Accuracy and Compliance
Smart forms leverage a wide range of capabilities—from input formatting and mandatory fields to real-time data validation and data transfers—that not only ensure data accuracy and completeness but help contain and protect the data as it comes in, transferring information to other systems with no manual intervention.
Fewer, More Meaningful Interactions
The objective in all of this is to get the most value out of every interaction—whether that’s with a customer, an employee, or a third-party agent. Collect all the information that is relevant to the task, ensure it’s accurate and complete, and avoid the time spent chasing someone down for something they thought they already finished.
Seamless Integration
Information gathered via interactive smart forms is automatically transferred to backend systems, CRM platforms, and other enterprise applications, facilitating efficient data exchange and streamlining business processes.
Positive Effect on Experience
Intelligent questioning, prefilled information, and personalized content create Know Your Customer (KYC) experiences that people appreciate and that are reflected in Customer Effort and Customer Experience scores.
See how smart forms can transform your business by optimizing data collection and analysis processes while streamlining customer communications.
Request a Demo of SmartIQ Today
How Smart Forms are Positively Impacting Regulated Industries
Embracing interactive forms can help you unlock the full potential of your data assets, drive business-led innovation, deliver an enhanced customer experience, and prepare you for the generation of mobile-first, digital-only customers and staff. Here’s how smart forms are having a dramatic effect in three highly-regulated industries, specifically:
Insurance: Transforming Data Collection
Today’s insurers are using smart forms to automate applications, renewals, and underwriting processes. Accurate and timely data collection is critical for each of these processes, to ensure new policies get written and existing policies are retained.
Additionally, insurers can create consistent experiences for everyone involved—whether they self-serve via the website, speak with a Customer Service Agent or broker, or there is a business-triggered event. This ensures information is collected consistently, regardless of how a process is initiated.
Financial Services: Preparing for the Next Generation of Investors
Banks and financial institutions are using smart forms to streamline and modernize everything from loan applications and servicing requests to portfolio rebalancing and asset allocation. By digitalizing these traditionally manual processes, they are gaining operational efficiencies and expediting outcomes but also preparing to meet the needs of the next generation of investors and clients.
Furthermore, leveraging this sophisticated technology allows financial advisors and wealth managers to deliver personalized financial advice and strategies based on their clients’ unique financial profiles, taking the customer experience to a whole new level.
Learn how to win over the next generation of investors. Read our latest white paper to find out how.
Healthcare: Enhancing Patient Care
Smart forms are revolutionizing the way patient data is collected, analyzed, and utilized. Digitizing patient intake forms, medical histories, treatment plans, and automating data capture and validation processes is leading to many positive results. By adopting an innovative approach, healthcare providers are reducing administrative burdens, improving data accuracy, better protecting patient confidentiality, ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements, and making more insightful clinical decisions.
Conclusion
Enterprise smart forms are not just a technological innovation, they represent a fundamental shift in how organizations collect, manage, and leverage data to drive business outcomes. As a result, companies that integrate smart forms into their processes are not only transforming how they collect and analyze data, but also their overall operations and customer experience.
Explore more ways smart forms can lead to a paradigm shift in the way you collect and analyze data. Watch our OnDemand webinar “Redefining Data Collection”.
About the Author
Sally Schulte has 15 years of experience in B2B marketing, eight of which have been spent marketing B2B SaaS technologies. As a Senior Product Marketing Director for Smart Communications, Sally leads the product marketing strategy for SmartIQ™and provides extensive support for industry analysts, creating and influencing new content, evaluating the go to market strategy and more. An engineer by degree, Sally understands the importance of taking a technical topic and making it readable (maybe even enjoyable) so that people understand how technology applies to their business and can make sound technology investments. Prior to joining Smart Communications, Sally worked in marketing for Morgan Stanley and AT&T.