Webform Portals: The Windows to Self-Service
You may be one of the 85% of enterprise decision makers who are racing to integrate digital initiative before falling behind. If so, the ability to allow customer, constituent, vendor and employee self-service on your websites can be one of the fastest ways to minimize back-office processing. Easy to stand up electronic form technology, backed by a powerful workflow engine, can connect people 24x7 on any device in collaborative business processes without paper, PDFs, or re-keying information.
Webform portals move automation to the front end of your business processes and can provide a relatively low-resource vehicle to automate endless processes, from human resources to customer service to accounting to public access. They deliver consistent performance that also supports exception handling. In other words, humans only need to be involved a fraction of the time.
Webform portals integrate form data with any business system
Some of the most substantial value you can achieve from electronic forms is gained through integrations with your existing business systems: line-of-business systems, ERPs, CRMs, Case Management systems (CMS), home-grown systems, and even databases.
Data can be pulled from these systems to auto-fill, validate and correct data in form fields, real-time, helping to ensure complete and accurate data.
Anytime in the process, the submitted data can be pushed to these systems to update records immediately.
Here are some examples that are likely to deliver a quick ROI:
Application Forms
Smart eForms applications collect field data through a simple but highly functional user interface. It supports signatures, uploading documents, images with annotations, auto-calculation, action-based dynamic sections that expand or collapse, progress bars and pop-up calendars. This type of intelligent webform enables quick user completion while supporting accurate and complete information. From social services to Higher Ed to financial services organizations—any business unit that has to process high volumes of applications as quickly as possible.
Public records requests
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has put the burden on already-strapped government agencies to provide requested information in a timely manner. Likewise, private companies have similar pressure to comply by producing documents or suffer sizable fines. In fact, cottage industries have cropped up that make exorbitant requests that are extremely difficult to fulfill, and thus provide an opportunity to cash in on litigation.
Online webforms enable requests to be processed in a trackable and transparent manner, both for the requestor and the fulfillers. Under the covers, there is sophisticated technology to automate redaction, search, routing and document management, particularly for popular requests. These tools, beginning with the portal, allow organizations to meet compliance without adding resources.
Invoice upload
Accounts payable can be one of the most document-intensive business processes. Although many invoices originate as digital documents or email, their efficiencies can be seriously limited without an efficient way to insert them into your ERP system. An invoice upload portal can provide several advantages, both for the submitting and the receiving organizations. An upload via a portal kicks off a workflow that provides visibility to the status of both invoices in-process and archives. Webform ingested invoices can enter quick, hands-free processing. Benefits include visibility to cash flow and early payment discounts.
Human Resource processes
HR departments can be one of the most process intensive departments, from employee onboarding documentation, leave requests, expense forms, change of name or address, and many more. HR forms exposed on an intranet portal provides 24/7 self-service on any device. Integration with your business applications and databases expedite form filling. Database look-ups can pre-fill, auto correct and validate as the employee is typing. Once submitted, powerful workflow routes for approval, validates data, provides alerts and reminders, and pushes data back to update business systems.
Improved service to your customers, constituents and employees is the core benefit of front-end automation. Processes that took weeks can be reduced to days or even hours. Lower costs, fast execution, reallocation of workers’ time provide additional advantages. In addition, these benefits can be compounded with cutting edge technologies like machine learning and robotic process automation (RPA).
With the right product, you can think of portals as the gateway to true automation. Our webform portal solutions utilize the powerful ILINX eForms platform, which provides end-to-end automation that can be extended to many processes.
Let us know if we can provide additional information about how webform portals can enable self-service and move automation to the front of your business processes. Our powerful workflow, and the ability to integrate with almost any business system, sets ILINX eForms apart from other electronic forms solutions. All ILINX software is enterprise ready so it can easily be extended from department to department. Visit our website to learn more about ILINX eForms, request specific information here, or give us a call at 360-943-9273.
