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Using Mobile to Improve Customer Engagement

Brant Clark, Product Marketing Director, Mobile Products & Solutions, Kofax from Lexmark

Brant Clark, Product Marketing Director, Mobile Products & Solutions, Kofax from Lexmark

One of the great truths about modern existence, whether in business or in our personal lives, is that mobile devices are indispensable. If you want to engage customers with virtually any product or service, you simply have to think mobile because consumers do.

"Mobile capture continues to grow in popularity among customers across a variety of industries"

In fact, according to the December 2014 comScore MobiLens® and Mobile Metrix® report, three quarters of mobile subscribers have smartphones, and they use these devices to conduct business, shop, take pictures, text, check sports scores and news, and even make the occasional phone call. Today’s customers are also more savvy than ever before. They know what they want, and they want transactions to be fast, easy and convenient. That means you need to engage customers in the manner – and via the device – they prefer, whether from a smartphone, tablet, email or in-person. Because if you don’t, they’ll find someone who will.

Smartphones are the preferred channel of engagement for most consumers, especially younger generations that are heavily reliant on their connected devices. By enabling customers to use their mobile devices to digitally capture documents, you empower them in the self-service process for questions, returns, disputes, etc. Digitizing documents eliminates the chance of paper documents being lost in the mail or post-delivery, and can be used to speed services such as bill pay, remote deposit, customer onboarding, mortgage origination and new account openings.

This is where mobile capture comes into the process.

Why Capture is Required for Mobile

Mobile capture is a standout feature that improves the user experience by removing friction from the process. This is supported by a 2014 AIIM study, in which 45 percent of companies surveyed felt that mobile capture is vitally important, and is at the heart of the customer engagement.

How Mobile Capture Works

To provide your customers with the best experience, a mobile capture solution should guide the user to frame the document within the device screen. Once it is positioned correctly, the mobile capture software will enable the flash (if needed), then automatically snap the picture once it is in focus.The user simply needs

to follow on-screen directions and line up the shot. It should be that easy. Data contained within documents automatically populates the appropriate fields, eliminating the need for tedious data entry, which is often prone to errors. Think about how many times you’ve typed something correctly on your mobile phone only to have spell check change it. Automatically prepopulating information bypasses this step and eliminates mistakes caused by typing and spell check. It shouldn’t matter whether information on the document is typed, handwritten, wrinkled, torn, stained or faded. Image-perfecting technology is crucial to preventing exceptions and a poor user experience.

Mobile capture provides benefits across many industries, including financial services, insurance and healthcare:

• Financial Services

It’s no longer routine to “stop by the bank” to conduct financial transactions. In fact, setting foot in a bank is a foreign concept to most millennials who expect the ability to conduct the majority of their business via their phones. Mobile capture holds significant value from the very start of the customer relationship. By capturing a driver’s license and documentation that verifies the new customer’s identity, banks have a powerful tool that streamlines and simplifies the new account opening process.

“Check deposit” is one of the most popular uses of mobile capture in the banking industry. Mobile capture technology enables customers to deposit checks anytime, anywhere, without visiting a branch or ATM. According to the Federal Reserve 2015 survey on Consumers and Mobile Financial Services, 51 percent of mobile banking users deposited a check using their mobile phone in 2014, up from 38 percent in 2013. Most financial industry payment experts expect that figure to jump again in 2015.

• Insurance

The insurance industry uses mobile capture to allow customers to submit claims forms and supporting documents to get their claims settled more quickly. Most customers have scanner functionality on their home printer, but they don’t know how to use it. Every customer with a smartphone has used the device to take a photo, and mobile capture is an extension of this easy, intuitive experience.

• Healthcare

Similarly, healthcare patients and personnel can use mobile capture to submit any type of document, including insurance cards, driver licenses, admission forms, insurance claims, EOBs, invoices, reports, clinical notes, advanced directives and lab results. This facilitates faster processing of claims, which contributes significantly to streamlining processes for improving patient care, reducing costs and complying with strict healthcare industry regulations.

Mobile Capture is Only the Beginning

Information delivered via mobile devices is just one method; organizations continue to manage information from a variety of channels such as web, email, paper, fax and others. The challenge is to get that information into the appropriate systems quickly and accurately so action can be taken. For many companies, moving this information from the originating correspondence into the core systems and applications is a manual process. While businesses can capture the document as it enters a system, more often than not they are merely creating an image of the document and routing that image for human review before eventually manually re-keying the required data for further processing.

By digitizing all information via capture and incorporating automated workflow solutions, companies can ingest key customer data quickly and with fewer errors. They can even go a step further and integrate the digitization of e-signatures and personalized customer communications all within the same business process. The result is greater responsiveness to the customer and improved accuracy during the transaction, leading to heightened customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Just as with mobile deposits, mobile capture continues to grow in popularity among customers across a variety of industries. It is expected by customers. Companies that don’t embrace mobile capture risk being left behind by competitors that do.