It doesn’t matter if you’re a creative design genius, an uber-geek software developer, a stellar sales person or the most meticulous project manager, the one thing we all have in common at Gruden is that every day we spend a lot of time talking to our customers.
And as we do we’re noticing significant changes taking place, which we believe reflect a strong shift in public expectations, and a growing maturity towards the use of the online channel.
People are starting to do things in ways many aren’t anticipating. For example the recent floods and storms produced surprising jumps in the volume of insurance claims via the Internet as the preferred option. These increases were not incremental, but measured in orders of magnitude greater than through call centres.
And we believe this is the beginning of an accelerating trend which will take us from the first generation online applications which customers often found less than satisfactory, sometimes even alienating.
Surveys over the recent years by Forrester, IDC and Tower have tended to support this view, with quotes such as;
- “Customers still opening 94% of new accounts in person or over the phone”
- “90% of online users having problems completing internet business transactions”
- “82% unwilling to accept lower levels of customer service online”
- “40% of the problems online users had involved error messages”
Others cited a lack of trust either in the size of the organisation, or the online experience appearing inconsistent with the service provided through face to face contact.
It can also be caused by simple things like overly complex pages, or online calculators that estimate repayments, but then do little else. Why are we not taking these processes through to the next stage of completion? Why aren’t companies offering an end-to-end solution?
The next generation of online channel will deliver a more comprehensive, intuitive and personalised experience, with interaction in context, and a much greater harmonisation of back end processes and services – all focused on the customer.
Online calculators will actually produce something that can be ordered. People should be able to retain their estimated repayments from the calculators and then follow through with an application. Today – it’s a 2 or 3 step process, possibly across 3 mediums – online, phone and then paper.
Why are we developing in this archaic way? Predominantly, because the tools and software previously available have not been at the level needed to truly integrate all parts of the process.
And we strongly believe public expectations will mature to the point that if you can’t deliver these levels of service and experience, you will risk losing business and customers.
Prospective customers will evaluate a company by how they represent themselves online, how they manage the channel, diversity of product, aesthetics, usability, simplicity, consistency, accuracy and robustness. In short, people will evaluate whether a company is in command of technology, or the other way around.
The new customers everyone wants will be those with the least time. And those customers will increasingly expect an organisation, particularly a large one, to be capable of marshalling its’ collective resources and assets to help them. If not, there will be plenty of alternatives.
Yes the adoption of mobile applications will grow, but that’s just a small part of it. The much bigger picture is how an organisation engages with people holistically and personally.
This doesn’t mean that a simple HTML form is a thing of the past, but it does mean that the generation that has grown up with Facebook, youtube, twitter etc will expect and demand more.
A way forward?
Adobe LiveCycle (LiveCycle) goes a long way to focusing and delivering on customer interactions – across the organisation, caring for both internal and external users. Products like LiveCycle are destined to become an important digital medium for future customer engagement and reducing service delivery costs.
LiveCycle is often categorized simply by the ability to convert static PDF documents into “smart forms”, but it’s much more than that. Much more than can be covered here, but the toolset LiveCycle provides enables business to really move into a new level and era of customer engagement.
But what is LiveCycle? In short, it’s a complimentary group of software tools incorporating industrial strength security and rights management, print management and document generation, Rich Internet Applications (RIA), rapid application development, reporting & analytics, personalized user work spaces, workflow, straight through processing and, yes, smart forms. (and more!)
It does seem like a lot, but essentially it enables organizations to win & retain customers and deliver products & services more efficiently across the organization.
Consider a mortgage application. The forms are long and complex, which means it’s easy to miss things and make mistakes. They require a lot of detail, which needs to be handled securely. And the likelihood is that it’s going to take more than five minutes and one sitting to complete.
If you make a mistake then you may have to make an unscheduled stop at the bank. But if the application is delayed, and you’re one link in a chain, then the impact can be disastrous.
And every bank bears significant fixed and variable costs for manually checking and correcting the quantities of forms they process, which is a burden they would prefer to do without.
LiveCycle removes these pains by providing the customer with an intuitive electronic form (or highly engaging RIA) they can use and update at their leisure. Forms can be pre-populated before they are downloaded and information entered can be checked to eliminate errors and omissions. It can then be tracked through the mortgage application lifecycle that offers total visibility to where the application is at in the process.
The bank benefits through automation and the customer’s expectations have been met or exceeded. The beauty of this is that it’s not only the online medium that wins – take for example the reduction to call centres, the ability to quickly and easily inform customers exactly where their application is at in real time.
At the end of the day – everyone wins.
Where are we at today?
In 2006 the Department of Finance and Deregulation released a strategy paper titled e-Government Strategy, Responsive Government: A New Service Agenda, which established a vision to provide “better services and better government” which revealed that; “Currently there are thousands of government forms, which Australian citizens must use to comply with the three tiers of government regulations. Analysis of the forms registered on GovForms indicate that the majority of these forms exist in ‘flat’, non-fillable PDF format, requiring citizens to print and fax or post forms back to the originating agency, rather than submitting them online to be processed in real-time.”
This report has endorsed and set in motion the use of Adobe LiveCycle for the provision of services across all tiers of Australian government because it provides the best medium for simplifying government and connecting government to constituents.
Whilst this is a move in the right direction, at Gruden we believe it can go so much further. Today, forms are boring and they don’t need to be. People engage more with a more creative or visual experience and that’s where we fit in.
As an Adobe Solutions Partner, Gruden is committed to helping customers leverage the benefits of LiveCycle and greatly improve their customer engagement and retention. Our unique blend of creative and technical skills combined with strong delivery disciplines can ensure that we can make LiveCycle come alive.
July 12th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
Nice work…when is the next one coming out?
Btw, if y velocity exceeds the height of a tile, collision detection doesn’t stop mario from falling through the world.
July 16th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Thanks teeps! We’re still trying to find time to continue it in the midst of production works. As soon as there’s an update I’ll post a new blog post again. Thanks for checking it out
P.S.: yes the collision detection still needs some major work as it’s very simplistic at the moment. I guess it needs some quick math intersection calculation, probably a dumbed-down version of those used in projecting bullet hits in FPS games.