Adobe and IBM partner to accelerate the digital economy with intelligent document transformation

Adobe and IBM are announcing their plans to help businesses improve the customer experience (CX) with intelligent document transformation.

In 2020, virtually every business had to quickly react to the unprecedented upheaval caused by lockdowns and a suddenly remote workforce. The companies that chose to prioritize the value of the customer experience and accelerate their transformation initiatives not only kept operations moving, they also laid the foundation for faster growth. These ‘experience leaders’ have reported 3x higher revenue growth over the past 2 years, demonstrating the benefits of capitalizing on the digital economy opportunity.

The digital experience revolution is just beginning. While marketing organizations were early adopters of customer digital experience transformation, initiatives are now expanding to departments enterprise-wide that seek to dramatically improve the end-to-end customer relationship lifecycle — from acquisition to service delivery, loyalty, retention and upsell.

But true experience transformation can’t be delivered by simply digitizing existing processes that were never designed with the customer in mind. Consumers are increasingly demanding a more intuitive, seamless and personalized digital experience from their service providers spanning every interaction. Consequently, business-critical workflows that affect the customer — whether they were previously human-driven or document-driven — must be redesigned to be customer-centric, intelligent, efficient, and 100 percent digital.

Delivering intelligent document transformation together

Experience leaders Adobe and IBM are expanding their strategic collaboration to focus on intelligent document transformation, combining the strength of Adobe Document Cloud’s digital document processing solutions and deep expertise in digital strategy and human-centered design and document automation from IBM iX, the business design arm of IBM Consulting.

• Intelligent document transformation empowers customers with a true, consistent omni-channel brand experience that provides unparalleled access and visibility to their information. By adding AI and analytics to document workflows, organizations can replace previously disconnected, manual, and paper-based processes with targeted and personalized experiences.
  What is Intelligent Document Transformation?
• By incorporating powerful document processing solutions such as Adobe Document Cloud and Experience Cloud, customers can complete transactions digitally, increasing their convenience, improving speed, reducing enterprise costs, and meeting organizational requirements for security, compliance and complexity. Adobe has been named a Leader in eSignatures in IDC’s recent MarketScape: Worldwide eSignature Software report 2021. And IBM’s recent acquisition of Rego Consulting’s Workfront practice will help scale and accelerate delivery of intelligent document transformation solutions that improve efficiency, quality and control of the end-to-end work management lifecycle.
• By pursuing a digital-first approach, intelligent document transformation solutions connect to enterprise systems, enabling the collection of structured and unstructured information that often lies outside of traditional consumer channels and can exponentially increase customer value.

Proven expertise from experience design to custom solution delivery

Adobe and IBM can design and deliver intelligent document transformation for clients worldwide and across all industries by combining IBM’s consulting expertise in human-centered experience design, systems integration, data and AI capabilities with Adobe’s leading digital document transformation technologies, and end-to-end document process automation and proprietary digital accelerators such as the IBM iX Experience Orchestrator, the IBM iX Digital Forms Accelerator, and Contactless Customer Journey.

“Organizations seeking to improve customer satisfaction and accelerate the customer lifecycle can count on IBM iX’s proven track record for delivering digital strategy advisory services and complete, end-to-end digital experience solutions designed to scale globally,” according to Jay Trestain, global offering lead for IBM iX’s Adobe Practice. “By combining our expertise with Adobe’s 30-year leadership in digital document processes, we can help organizations unlock efficiencies that drive faster cycle times, deliver greater accuracy, and allow organizations to transform more workflows, more quickly.”

The other side of the digital economy: Gaining greater efficiencies

Delivering an exceptional customer experience and gaining greater business efficiencies go hand in hand. When businesses reinvent the customer experience, they can also simultaneously design processes that eliminate steps, improve security and compliance, and save money. For instance, Forrester found that when enterprises create digital document workflows with Adobe Sign e-signatures and automated approvals, they typically improve signature cycle time 28X, save $28 per e-signature transaction, and earn an average 420 percent ROI on their Adobe Sign investment.

“Our combined intelligent document transformation capabilities represent a deepening of the IBM and Adobe partnership and provide enterprises with a powerful way to accelerate and successfully achieve their goals for digital experience transformation,” says Simon Williams, VP of strategic development at Adobe. “End customers will see meaningful benefits that will drive higher satisfaction and loyalty. Enterprises will also benefit from revenue growth, greater agility, and higher profitability.”

IBM implemented its own initiative in the early days of the pandemic, for a large number of employees who needed to transfer as part of IBM spinning off its managed infrastructure services business, Kyndryl. IBM HR needed to process all the transfer letters within a short timeframe, adhering to security and compliance practices, and complete the entire process with a newly remote workforce. Use of Adobe Sign allowed IBM to provide its employees with an exceptional experience, reduce document turnaround by 80 percent, meet security and compliance requirements, and significantly reduce printing, posting, and storage costs.

To learn more about how IBM and Adobe are working together, or how we are helping organizations design and deliver intelligent document transformation, visit here.