Use cases for IBM Forms Experience Builder Contents 1 Creating exceptional forms experiences 2 Introducing IBM Forms Experience Builder 3 Managing the business 4 Getting close to customers 4 Generating operational efficiencies 6 Improving service delivery 7 Fostering innovation Creating exceptional forms experiences Anticipating and responding to customer needs are what an exceptional digital experience is all about, and web forms are no exception. Web forms play an important role in the delivery of services and how we engage our customers and employees. We use them to let customers enroll in programs, access services and even tell us what they think about our products and services. An exceptional forms experience will greatly improve the likelihood that customers will engage in the programs you offer. A bad or just mediocre experience will likely be abandoned. Exceptional web forms can help you get to know your customers, manage your business, improve operational efficiencies and more. They enable end-to-end automation and help you deliver digital self-services to customers and employees. Forms can increase the value of your web experience and offer new ways to reach out to your customers and employees. An exceptional forms experience needs to be dynamic and engaging. It should anticipate and provide content that assists a user in achieving a goal. The experience should unfold dynamically as the user answers questions and makes choices. Ask questions only when they are relevant. Use profile information to personalize the experience. Prepopulate fields with known information to assist the user. The form itself should share a common look and context with the overall digital experience you create.
Applications are generated based on a modern web architecture of HTML, JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Each form automatically generates its own secure database, eliminating the need for any special skills or IT staff involvement. Business users can easily specify workflow logic and access control for automating processes. You can deploy forms as stand-alone web applications, through a portlet via IBM WebSphere Portal software; to mobile devices; or even as a post to a social site like Facebook or IBM Connections. Figure 1. Simple to design and deploy as part of your web experience. Introducing IBM Forms Experience Builder IBM Forms Experience Builder is a new capability that is included in IBM WebSphere Portal Extend, IBM Employee Experience Suite and IBM Customer Experience Suite software. It enables business users to build and deploy rich selfservice applications in a point-and-click fashion with nothing more than a web browser. Business users who are comfortable creating spreadsheets will be able to quickly learn and use it. Figure 2. Example of a feedback form. You can deploy Forms Experience Builder as a central selfservice environment, so that all of your business users can create and deploy their own applications. Users design, deploy and access their application with nothing more than a browser. Deployed in this fashion, Forms Experience Builder can support a vast number of business users. Business users can decide who has access to the applications they design and deploy and even the time frame in which they want to make the applications available. 2
You can extend the Forms Experience Builder environment by exposing other systems and data as services for business users to map into the applications they build. For example, IT could expose a service that lets users find out which products a customer has purchased. With this service a business user could design a form that lets him or her pick a customer from a drop-down menu and then and see a list of products that the customer has purchased. Or perhaps the business user builds a requisition form that lets an employee look up a manager and e-mail address for routing a form for approval. Once IT exposes services to the Forms Experience Builder catalog, business users can easily integrate them into compelling web forms over and over again, without the aid of IT. There are many types of applications that business users can create with Forms Experience Builder. Continue reading to explore examples of what IBM clients have created and some ideas of what is possible with Forms Experience Builder. Managing the business We all know the routine of the dreaded monthly status report. Someone on your team sends around a large file that you have to download. Then you find the few lines you have to update and send it back. You hope your changes aren t accidentally overwritten by a colleague and are thankful that you re not the one who has to compile all these changes into a consolidated deck. This monthly game of pass-the-file wastes time and clogs up email. Fortunately, this entire process can be automated via Forms Experience Builder. Applications can be created to collect the latest project updates, sales forecasts or other information. They can dynamically present users with the latest data and then prompt them for their updates. For example, sales representatives might be presented with a form showing up-to-date sales data for their territory and then prompting them for a forecast of the upcoming period. Or a project manager might distribute a form that presents a member with the latest progress on his or her work and prompts the member for any updates and issues. All data collected is automatically stored and available for reporting and analysis. This data can even be exported to other systems such as Lotus Symphony, Microsoft Excel or an XML spreadsheet for further processing. Figure 3. Example of a customer survey. 3
Getting close to customers Forms Experience Builder can help your business users figure out who your customers really are and what they want. Lead capture It s a common experience: you want to download a white paper or register for a webinar, but you need to enter information about yourself first. You are responding to something of interest, and the offering organization wants to know something about you. This pattern of filling out a registration form needs to be simple and smooth. You do not want to lose a prospect because your capture process is cumbersome. Forms Experience Builder lets you create the experience you need to capture leads and automatically hand them off to the appropriate parties for follow-up. Feedback If you want to know what your customers or employees think, why not put a quick survey out on your website? What about sending a link to a survey via email or even posting the survey to a social site like Facebook or Twitter? Forms Experience Builder enables you to create professionallooking surveys and polls in minutes. You can rapidly deploy one, change it and then redeploy the revised survey. You have full control over when the survey or poll opens and closes. Data collection is automatic, and the data can be easily exported to popular reporting tools or spreadsheets, such as Symphony and Excel. Figure 4. Example of a customer self-service form. Generating operational efficiencies Forms Experience Builder can help your organization streamline common and special business processes. Onboarding The onboarding process whether for a new employee, customer or business associate requires a broad set of applications and a number of processes. Each scenario is different and has its own set of tasks that need to be completed. 4
Forms Experience Builder lets you create forms to capture needed information and then initiate the appropriate work streams to facilitate the onboarding process. The tool lets you specify the roles and workflows required for the onboarding process, and it integrates with back-end systems to streamline processes. These form workflows can notify, engage and synchronize all parties involved in the onboarding effort. You can generate notifications to alert team members of work items that need to be performed and then automatically route the form for approvals. Inspection Onsite inspections no longer require clipboards and paper. You can use Forms Experience Builder to create forms for quality inspections, audits, inventories, retail store inspections and more and deploy them on mobile devices for the efficient collection of information. Once you collect your data, it s immediately available for reporting or exporting to another system for processing, so you can get real-time updates on your operations with modest effort. Registration You can make it easy for your customers and employees to register for programs and activities. With Forms Experience Builder, you can easily design and deploy forms that let them enroll in your programs. Forms will automatically capture the data you need and store it in its relational database. Backend systems can be updated through services to provide an end-toend solution. Integrate the registration form into your website with the Forms Experience Portlet and watch more customers register for your programs. Surveys You can measure and monitor the quality of your products and services by surveying your customers. Forms Experience Builder lets you build quick surveys that encourage customers to tell you what they think. These surveys can collect data over time and track trends to give insight into the quality you are delivering by whether customer satisfaction is improving or getting worse. The data becomes a baseline to measure your quality control efforts. As with other forms, this data can be exported to your business intelligence tools to gain customer insights. Figure 5. Example of submitting and voting on ideas. Applications When you want to apply for loan, job, grant, license, permit or some other type of service, you need to fill out an application. Many of the application questions are based on the applicant or perhaps demographics. Forms Experience Builder lets you 5
easily design dynamic forms that adjust to the user s input. It features agile workflow and service integration that can become an ideal front end to the application process for your organization. Business users can also use Forms Experience Builder to specify business logic that automatically validates and approves forms, either instantly or leading to additional steps in the application process. Improving service delivery Forms Experience Builder can help your company improve customer satisfaction whether internal or external customers. Employee self-service Make it easy for employees to engage in human resource (HR) related activities. Forms Experience Builder can enable HR staff to create secure forms-based services for filling out time sheets, vacation requests, benefits enrollment, direct deposit and other activities. Or it can provide managers with complex forms that help them engage in talent management or workforce planning. These forms can be prepopulated with employee data, and you make them available through your organization s employee intranet via the Forms Experience Portlet. With its agile workflow and service integration, you can route forms for approval and automatically update the appropriate back-end systems. Customer self-service Great customer service will make your offerings stand out from those of the competition. With Forms Experience Builder, you can create forms that walk customers through their issues, identify their problems and help them zero in on solutions. You can collect information that will help provide customers with resolutions, without having to ask them for more information. Integrate a form into your knowledge base, build it into your help desk solution or create a freestanding form as part of your web experience to provide customers with an intuitive, guided way to get the help they need, whenever they need it. Crowd source Forms Experience Builder enables you to crowd source and tap into experts. This form lets customers ask questions and then engage the appropriate expert from the crowd to answer it. Experts can nominate themselves, declare expertise on specific topics and commit to answering questions. The form notifies the experts of questions through email. This kind of form yields a virtual network of knowledge and happier customers who will want to continue to come back to your site. Complex buying decisions Understanding and deciding on the correct product whether it s cell phone service, a support contract, an insurance policy or medical benefit options can often be daunting. Forms Experience Builder can provide a highly dynamic experience to aid users with complex decisions. Logic can be driven through services or built right into the application. Answers to questions lead to a different set of questions, refining the selection criteria and presenting the options to users that are best suited for their needs. Selections in the form can drive content seen elsewhere on the web page, which provides context for the customer s buying decision. For example, when a customer adds a product to an online shopping cart, a rating for that particular product appears elsewhere on the page. If the rating is favorable, the customer receives positive reinforcement for buying the product. 6
Fostering innovation Forms Experience Builder gives your business the tools needed to boost innovation throughout your organization. Ideation Ideation is a new buzzword but a mature concept. You can think of it as the modern day suggestion box only more social. Forms Experience Builder enables you to create an ideation form that let users suggest ideas and vote on ideas put forth by other users. Forms can be deployed on your intranet, a specific forum or social site or can be sent via email. Business user development If you want to boost innovation, you can give business users a tool that they can rapidly mold into a solution that fits their needs. Forms Experience Builder can be deployed to business users, with little training and support. If they can build a spreadsheet, then they can design a form with Forms Experience Builder. Extending new services Is the startup investment in IT too high to provide new services to customers or employees? With Forms Experience Builder, business users can create new applications that let customers engage with your organization in new ways. Whether it s a brand-new service or a simpler version of an existing system, you can quickly transform a process with a more user-friendly interface and offer higher levels of value to your customers without involvement from IT. For more information To learn more about Forms Experience Builder, please contact your IBM marketing representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit the following website: lotus.com/ldd/lfwiki.nsf/dx/forms_experience_builder_ Demonstrations_and_Videos Additionally, IBM Global Financing can help you acquire the software capabilities that your business needs in the most cost-effective and strategic way possible. We ll partner with credit-qualified clients to customize a financing solution to suit your business and development goals, enable effective cash management, and improve your total cost of ownership. Fund your critical IT investment and propel your business forward with IBM Global Financing. For more information, visit: ibm.com/financing 7
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