Digital customer journeys with eSignatures: the roadmap to digital transformation in financial services

Over the last decade, many companies have focused their digital transformation initiatives on automating back-end processes and digitizing parts of their workflows. 

Efficiency in the back office is often the first area of digital transformation initiatives in financial services.

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By digitizing data, documents, and signature intake, the whole organization becomes more efficient. Technologies supporting these goals, such as RPA, OCR, and Machine Learning, have quickly gained adoption, becoming some of the fastest-growing enterprise technologies out there.

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The importance of end-to-end digital transformation

Today, organizations are increasingly facing the need to update their sales process to align with modern expectations. Digital transformation priorities are shifting towards customer experience improvements. The financial services customer experience strategy is shifting and looking for technologies that can support the rapid digitization of customer-facing processes and interactions. 

The role of technology keeps changing and adapting as new problems arise that need to be solved. Today, serving customers without heavily relying on digital channels for core business processes, including customer origination, onboarding, service, and support, is no longer possible, even for conservative businesses such as insurance.

It is no longer enough to digitize the back-end processes to achieve efficiency in organizational workflows. Technology is now at the core of the business, driving revenue growth, and is responsible for meeting the business objectives.

The entire organization, including back- and front-office operations, must rely on technology to achieve these ambitious goals. Digital journeys are replacing or supplementing other kinds of interactions, while back-office processes are largely digitized and automated for efficiency. 

The future of paperwork: digital journeys with eSignatures

Digital transformation cannot be complete without digitizing the entirety of customer experience and making remote servicing is easily accessible to customers and prospects on multiple channels.  Even if some of your processes are digital to some extent (for example, quoting or onboarding,) partial digitization is not enough. Consumer expectation these days is a digital, frictionless journey all around.

One area where the disparity between customer expectations and the reality is apparent is paperwork. Financial institutions are required to collect customer data, documents, and signatures from kickstarting core business processes such as customer onboarding, policy renewals, claims processing, and personal details updates. 

When it comes to paperwork, the issue of customer experience has not been tackled yet. Until recently, customers were expected to fill in paper forms, clunky PDFs, or make do with subpar customer portals that leave much to be desired when it comes to user experience. 

Paperwork always was treated as a necessary evil, but customers are no longer willing to tolerate friction, long waiting times, or clunky and inconvenient forms and processes.

The cost of manual paperwork

At an enterprise level, the cost of processing the paperwork quickly adds up. We have calculated that by removing inefficient paperwork, an organization that processes 10 form types with only 500 submissions each, can save almost $60K monthly by eliminating manual processing from its operations.

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Calculate how much the paperwork truly costs you with this handy ROI calculator

But the true cost of paperwork has another crucial component - the lost revenue. By frustrating potential customers with clunky experiences, companies risk losing out to the competition. Customers are looking for best-in-breed experiences and have little patience for friction or inconvenience during the onboarding or sign-up process. With many digital options readily available, existing customers are quick to jump ship to a more digitally mature competition as well.

Companies can no longer afford to offer subpar digital experiences. But creating digital journeys at the level of today's customer expectations is anything but an easy task.

How digital data and eSignature collection benefits the entire organization

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Improving the customer experience

Collecting documents, data, and signatures digitally empowers customers to complete any kind of journey any time, anywhere. No longer are customers required to sign paperwork in person, scan and print documents, or send paperwork via post. 

Enabling self-service

By giving the customer all the tools to fill in applications digitally, customers can complete many processes without any interaction with the company staff. Digital journeys can seamlessly guide the customer through any kind of process.

Maintaining data integrity

By validating data in real-time at the point of entry, digital journeys ensure that the data that flows into the organization’s internal systems is accurate. With traditional paper-based paperwork and PDF forms, the ratio of Not-in-good-order documents and errors is exceptionally high, often reaching 30% of all forms submitted. 

High error rates mean that customer service representatives need to reach out to the customer to correct errors, creating inefficient back-and-forth communications that cause delays and frustration.

By ensuring that the data is validated in real-time as the customer imputing the data and pre-filling the fields with information the organization already has on the customer, the data integrity is maintained.

Back-and-forth exchanges necessary to correct the errors are taken out of the equation entirely, saving time and speeding up processes. This results in happier customers and saves time for higher value-added tasks.

Ensuring data is readily available across the organization

By collecting data and eSignatures in a digital-native format, the customer data can be funneled into CRM and other internal systems where it can be easily accessed by anyone who needs it within the organization, eliminating delays and improving the quality of service.

Analytics and optimization

Digital data can be analyzed, and the insights derived from the analysis can be used to optimize and improve performance and customer experience.

The place of no-code in driving digital transformation

Digital transformation is an all-encompassing task. Selecting technologies that can help achieve digital transformation goals quickly, efficiently, and at scale is becoming of paramount importance.

No-code/low-code tools are one of such technologies that amplify digital transformation in many organizations today. No-code platforms empower employees with no coding knowledge to spin up new digital products through the use of drag-and-drop visual builders.

No-code tools amplify existing IT resources, reduce costs, and help organizations achieve scalability. But most importantly, no-code tools bring agility to the often slow-moving world of enterprise IT.

Digital journeys are complex and often entail lengthy development projects that take months. No-code tools speed up the process of creating digital journeys with eSignatures, shortening release cycles from weeks and days to hours and minutes.

No-code platforms don't only accelerate the time to market by orders of magnitude but also empower organizations to create better customer experiences at scale. By giving the customer-facing teams tools to improve customer-facing interactions with digital tools quickly, organizations can quickly remove friction and improve customer experience.

By using the no-code platform instead of custom code, organizations also reap the benefits of data analytics and optimization capabilities. By aggregating the data from all digital journeys within the organization into a single dashboard, organizations can quickly isolate friction points to improve the overall customer experience. Ongoing optimization also becomes an integral process in the way the organization works.

Customer journeys with eSignatures in a matter of minutes

No-code tools are driving digital transformation in financial services by offering unparalleled speed and agility while saving costs and cutting the development time by orders of magnitude. 

Organizations cannot afford to be stuck with inefficient customer-facing interactions. Customers expect the best experience from any service provider, including their insurer or bank. To reach the platform age of digital transformation, financial service organizations can quickly gain ground by adding a no-code platform to their tool stack.