IBM iX Forms Accelerator for Adobe Experience Manager aids customer experience transformation

The IBM iX Adobe Forms Accelerator for Adobe Experience Manager transforms complex form development and provides a great customer experience for end users.

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COVID-19 has had a profound effect on the way employees work and customers connect with businesses and their services. The emphasis on digital, web-based applications and processes has never been greater. Digital online forms, in particular, play a huge role in enabling people to securely share and submit essential, often sensitive information.

Consequently, the pandemic has accelerated the need for large enterprises to rapidly bring to market digital online forms. These processes must offer customers and citizens a high-quality user experience, while being cost-effective to create and manage. So, with this in mind, IBM and Adobe collaborated on the creation of the IBM iX Forms Accelerator for Adobe Experience Manager, to help large organisations speed up the development of complex, user-friendly forms.

The joint solution arose from IBM and Adobe’s strategic partnership. It combines Adobe Experience Manager Forms with IBM’s business design capabilities and proprietary accelerator for the development of digital experiences, the IBM iX Experience Orchestrator. As a result, regulated industries in particular are able to create, manage, publish and update secure and complex personalized digital forms. They can integrate these easily into their back-end systems, business rules and data.

The upshot? Financial Services firms can enhance applications for mortgage payment holidays (a break in regular payments), for example. Healthcare organizations can track COVID-19 patients more effectively. Public Sector bodies can use digital forms to make it easier for citizens to apply for benefits, grants, loans and so on. The forms solutions’ strength is in their usability, simplicity and integration.

What’s more, using the IBM iX Forms Accelerator for Adobe Experience Manager, large enterprises can avoid the inefficiency and considerable software engineering required to ‘lift and shift’ paper-based processes. Processes which can result in complex and costly digital forms that provide a poor customer experience.

Greater forms compliance and control for business users

Help with compliance is another feature of IBM iX Forms Accelerator for Adobe Experience Manager, which is great news for highly regulated industries. The solution can help enterprises both accelerate development and reduce compliance cycle effort by using standardized components, drawing from its proprietary component library that can deliver a 93% reduction in effort compared to hard-coding forms.

The Adobe Experience Manager Forms part of the solution also minimizes the components needed to build and manage current and future forms. Adobe Experience Manager Forms significantly reduces server load and storage costs, which has led to businesses seeing an impressive 379% ROI in three years.

The combined IBM iX Forms Accelerator for Adobe Experience Manager puts the power into the hands of business units, instead of requiring them to wait for I.T. to respond to raised tickets. It does this by equipping teams with central form management and documentation, giving them the direct knowledge on how to build forms. Thus, business users get empowered with ownership over their own forms, data and the customer experience.

Improved customer and citizen experience

To provide an unparalleled experience for users, IBM iX Forms Accelerator for Adobe Experience Manager (an Adobe Accredited solution) is designed to deliver dynamic forms, rather than static ones, which adapt based on context and segment. The inputted data is then used to drive connected customer experiences (CX) and workflow management. Also, there is clear logic through the forms, so users are only served with content that is relevant to them. All of its elements and styling are UK Government Digital Services (GDS) compliant: a mark of accessibility, security and usability.

In addition, it is clear to users early on in a form if they don’t qualify for a service. This avoids unnecessary form filling, which improves the user experience. As a result, Adobe Experience Manager Forms are proven to drive faster onboarding of new customers by 61%; and increase the use of customer self-service by 113%.

Technical flexibility enhances form creation and management

Out of the box, for Adobe Experience Manager Forms offers businesses high-quality forms, with comprehensive form management and analytics, that can be integrated into back-end systems. So, for example, you can digitize end-to-end processes by integrating with Adobe Sign, the cloud-based, enterprise-class e-signature service. The high level of technical flexibility makes the forms very customizable, secure and easy to manage and maintain.

Also worth noting is security. The forms protect customer data using built-in zones that meet security requirements for Public Sector and Financial Institutions. There’s also support for micro-services and adaptors to allow flexible storage and front-end integrations. Additionally, the solution has third-party integration components such as National Insurance number, Mastercard/Visa, and frequent flyer membership accounts for data validation.

IBM iX Forms Accelerator for Adobe Experience Manager has embedded intelligence thanks to its IBM Watson Explorer capability. This clever AI feature can iteratively learn to advance forms through a process or pass them on to a human for manual review. And, as announced in July 2020, IBM and Adobe will be helping companies in highly regulated industries like Financial Services meet the highest levels of data and security compliance, with Adobe Experience Manager (including Forms) certified on RedHat OpenShift and IBM Cloud for Financial Services.

IBM & Adobe: A combination for client success

Large enterprises around the world are already enjoying the advantages of the new IBM & Adobe solution. One major global bank was able to drive down the cost of producing each form by more than 80%, bringing 21 multi-lingual business critical forms into production in three months with design and analytics compliance.

Meanwhile, a UK Government Agency reduced the effort to create each form by 96%. The organization reduced over 7000 forms to just 26 with a pilot program that was developed in three months, and production-ready in four months. Each form is UK Government Digital Services compliant and features embedded AI.

As the pandemic has accelerated organizations’ need for digital transformation and put greater emphasis on the use of forms, the IBM iX Forms Accelerator for Adobe Experience Manager could be right for your company.

To find out more about how IBM and Adobe are helping organizations design and deliver next-generation customer experiences that drive growth and foster loyalty, at scale — visit: https://adobeamplify.com/partners/ibm-ix/.