In the post-COVID-19 digital era, business organisations are adjusting to the new reality of hybrid office usage and remote working. With many employees now working from home or on the road, businesses can no longer rely on working practices that involve a physical presence, or the use of outdated bureaucratic processes based on paper forms. Given the new realities of modern business, more and more organisations are now making the transition to digital interactions, and digitally assisted business processes.
Among the key components facilitating this transition are workflow automation and the use of electronic forms – especially powerful online forms that give a business access to the views and input of customers, suppliers and external stakeholders.
What is workflow automation?
A workflow is a stage by stage progression that accomplishes a particular business function or operation. Workflow automation is a technique that breaks these business processes down into a logical sequence of operations – each of which is ripe for transformation into a digital component that can be modelled by workflow automation software.
What are electronic forms?
The digital components of an automated business workflow will often involve data collection of one kind or another. Here again, this information is ideal for transformation into digital form data by electronic forms software. Electronic forms have been around for a while, and are easy to recognise from examples like this:
When you create electronic forms, you have a more versatile and less wasteful option than paper forms. Using electronic forms software that provides templates or drag and drop form builder tools, you can define specific field types and form fields – and specify how form data entered into these form fields should be treated in accordance with existing business rules.
For example, you can configure electronic forms to move business processes forward through pre-defined stages, such as “submitted,” “in progress,” or “completed.” You can also set up notifications for each form, so that tailored alerts are sent to the right employees or shared email accounts.
What types of electronic forms can increase your productivity?
Using electronic forms, business organisations can manage requests, orders, and applications at scale. By extending their reach with online forms, business administrators can receive feedback and input from their own employees, external suppliers, and consumers, collect payments, and effectively field customer inquiries.
Using the Claromentis e-forms and workflows application – Infocapture – organisations can easily build any individual process that is important to their business.
When specific teams, such as HR or finance teams, are responsible for managing requests from other teams, groups of users, or even the entire workforce – these requests can be managed swiftly and effectively as they are moved through various statuses until the request is fully responded to. Any communication that’s required takes place through notes on the requests themselves.
Full notifications ensure that each person is aware of progress or items requiring their attention and/or action. This approach replaces the confusing, inefficient, and outdated use of emails, and in doing so drastically increases performance and efficiency while minimising errors.
Some of the electronic forms that your business can use to more effectively manage processes and data include the following.
1. Customer feedback
Feedback forms can be easily created so customer feedback can be collected, replied to, managed, and analysed. The insights gained can then be passed on to service delivery and product teams for continuous improvement.
2. Budget approval
Using Infocapture, investment requests and decisions can be moved through all approval stages, processes, and the various levels of seniority that need to be involved depending on the size of the investment.
3. Operational processes
This is where the customisation features of Infocapture really come into their own. Every business has unique and important processes that are directly connected with their products and services. Here, the automation features of Infocapture produce directly measurable efficiency gains and ensure all teams are kept informed as the business delivers its individual products and services to customers.
4. Incident reporting
Capturing and acting upon any incident that has implications for quality of service, security, or that indicates a need for process improvements is a fundamental part of ISO quality standards and security frameworks. Compliance with such standards and frameworks benefit from incident reporting forms and processes.
5. Lessons learned
Often combined with incident reporting, lessons learned is a process that captures knowledge as various tactics and strategies are implemented and adjusted based on real-world experience.
6. New hire onboarding
Within the Claromentis central hub, the process of onboarding new staff is a combination of e-forms and workflows with appropriate training delivered via the Claromentis Learning Management System (LMS). The onboarding process often focusses on making sure all actions are taken to bring the new hire smoothly into the company’s operations – for example, getting to grips with operating equipment, setting up software accounts, or scheduling initial introductions.
7. Online forms for human resources (HR) management
You can create electronic forms and make them accessible online, via web forms and mobile devices. These online forms can help your human resources managers monitor and handle requests for holidays, employee benefits and staff training. Powerful online forms can also solicit input from potential new hires and be incorporated into an automated workflow for recruitment.
8. Electronic forms for purchasing orders
The approval process for making purchases has traditionally been a long, involved, and often frustrating experience. Your business can reduce much of this stress by creating an automated workflow for purchasing orders, with electronic forms for data collection and feedback from key stakeholders in the buying process. Any data collected from completed forms can be used to trigger follow up actions in line with existing business rules.
9. Electronic forms for project management
As part of your project management and team collaboration processes, you can use online forms that enable employees to submit data and materials relevant to a project, and work on relevant documents and content. Online forms can also contain gateways to access other resources, such as form fields with links to a website, or to other systems and business tools relevant to the project.
10. Online forms for marketing
Your marketing division can create electronic forms to streamline various business processes relating to their job function. For example, your employees might use online forms for event planning, or for content marketing requests.
11. Customer support web forms
You can deploy online forms of various kinds, to empower your support team to better handle customer inquiries and support requests. These may include web forms embedded on your business website and online portals, e-forms accessible via mobile devices, and e-forms to get feedback from customers on social media.
12. Customer success forms
You can use electronic forms for customer support with specific form fields, and/or dedicated online customer success management forms to collect data relating to how well or otherwise your products and services are being received by your target customers. Data collected from electronic forms like this can be instrumental in helping to improve your offerings.
Choosing an automated workflow and electronic forms software platform
Your ability to create electronic forms that actually do enhance your business processes and increase productivity depends on making the right choice of electronic forms software.
Here at Claromentis, we provide powerful workflow automations and digital forms that do the busywork for you.
Our electronic forms empower your teams to replace paper forms with digital forms of all kinds, including support help desks, loan applications, sales orders, agile meeting retrospectives – you name it. Simply drag and drop form fields into place to build custom tailored forms that match your business needs in just a few clicks.
Our smart workflow automation technology ensures your business processes are based on accurate data and run as smoothly as possible. You can add workflow automations to hide or display form fields when an action takes place, create business rules that trigger automatic updates based on workflow events, and use mandatory fields to capture essential form data.
Our workflow automation software for electronic forms comes with a built-in report wizard with smart filtering features, allowing you to create custom reports for detailed analysis of form data.
To find out more about how Claromentis can empower you to create electronic forms that enhance your business processes and improve company productivity, book a demo with our experts.
