One pattern I keep seeing is that organisations have digitised the point of submission, but not necessarily the work that follows. Customers can submit requests, claims, applications and enquiries online with ease, while online form processing may still involve significant manual work behind the scenes.
A useful test is whether an online submission can move through to the intended outcome without manual intervention. If staff must monitor an inbox, review attachments, check completeness, route the submission or enter information into another system before it can be acted on, the process is only partly digital.
A digital front end does not always mean an efficient back office
In our work, we often find that the form is doing exactly what it was designed to do. The manual effort sits in what happens next.
The level of intervention can vary. Some submissions may need only a quick check, while others require supporting documents to be reviewed, missing information to be followed up or an exception to be resolved. The important question is whether these steps are occasional exceptions or a routine part of completing the process.
Manual work can become part of the everyday process
What makes this work difficult to spot is that it rarely sits with one person or team. Instead, it is spread across the organisation and absorbed into established ways of working.
Individually, these tasks may take only a few minutes. At volume, they can create significant administrative effort and delay the business outcome that matters, whether that is progressing a claim, onboarding a customer, assessing an application, processing a referral or responding to a request.
What happens after submission?
Think about a recent online submission. Before it could be acted on, did someone need to complete any of the following tasks?
- Open or download it
- Review supporting documentation
- Check whether the information was complete
- Re-enter information into another system
- Decide who should receive it
- Follow up missing information
If several of these steps are familiar, there may be an opportunity to improve the efficiency of the back-office process.
Improve what happens after submission
Improving online form processing does not necessarily require another form, a new portal or the replacement of a system that already works. The focus may simply need to shift to the manual work that remains after submission, work that is often left alone simply because it has always been done that way, not because it cannot be improved.
This is where Intelligent Document Processing fits. It can understand submitted content, validate information against business rules and update existing business systems. For example, information and supporting documents can be captured and checked before they are passed into the relevant system, with exceptions directed to staff.
Want to learn more about reducing the manual work behind your online forms?