When you initially get information from potential clients and customers, how do you get it? Must they complete a printed form that your staff must then process, or have you opted for a more efficient digitized intake form? If you’ve chosen the latter, well done. But if you’re still undecided about whether a digitized option is right for you and your organization, here are 8 benefits to digitizing intake forms with Majime that may help you make your decision.

1. Eliminating Data Errors

Did you know that errors from digital conversation cost the US economy $1.3 trillion each year? These errors can happen when a member of your staff takes information from a paper form and enters it into your system. It can also come from misfiling, losing forms, time spent clarifying information a customer provided and what seems like a thousand other ways. When your intake forms are digitized, you decrease the errors that come from manual processes as well as eliminate all the lost time rectifying those errors. It may not save your company $1.3 trillion itself, but digitized forms will almost certainly make a difference in your bottom line for this year.

2. Provide Data Your Employees Can Trust

According to the Harvard Business Review, knowledge workers spend 50% of their time correcting bad data or confirming data they do not trust. Some of this bad data comes from paper forms and their subsequent processing. By digitizing your company’s intake forms, you can eliminate the guessing at data that your workers otherwise spend their time on and instead provide reliable data that they can trust. This saves time and frustration, setting your employees up for higher morale and more efficient use of their time.

3. Quick Search Capabilities

A typical employee spends 18 minutes searching for a single paper form. As a result, companies waste valuable resources processing and maintaining paper forms. The labor cost of maintaining a standard filing cabinet alone adds up to $1500 a year. And a lost document? Each one costs its business a staggering $350-700. Rather than shuffling through papers and digging through files, your employees can do a quick search that takes less than a minute and retrieves exactly what they are looking for when your forms are digitized saving you both time and money.

4. Increased Accessibility

In today’s world, accessibility is important. You might be surprised to know that 1.3 billion people live with some kind of vision impairment. Our world’s inhabitants speak roughly 6,500 different languages. Your customer base may not be the world’s entire population, but odds are you have potential clients and employees who would benefit from aids such as alternative text to images and translation services. Digitized forms make it easier to provide the scaffolding necessary to reach clients who might otherwise not be able to access your form and, as a result, your company. These services are not difficult to embed in digitized intake forms while paper forms make it nearly impossible to connect with all.

5. Saving Man-Power (And Money)

Your company will go on to save more money when your employees no longer need to scan incoming paper forms, retype handwritten forms completed by clients, perform data entry to transfer information from paper to digital systems, and other processes specific to your industry. At Majime, we have even found that companies outsourcing data-entry offshore can achieve a strong ROI by automating or eliminating data entry with technology. By decoupling from outsourced data entry, we also eliminate the data security risks associated with offshoring.       

6. Digitized Information Powers Automation

Whether we automate the extraction of data from a scanned form or we implement a digital forms process, the result will be good, structured data from which we can enable automation. We can perform calculations, data manipulation, and pass data to downstream applications. At Majime, we can do this through Robotic Process Automation without the need for complex coding or back-end interfacing. Through RPA, we can automate processes with minimal impact to your existing IT environment making your digitized system more accurate and efficient than manual processing.

7. Enforcing Field Constraints

When you use digitized intake forms, you have the option of auto constraints, this limits the responses customers can choose for a given question. When you do this, your data is more accurate and reliable, and you don’t have to take up space on the page with a myriad of multiple-choice questions. We can also use dynamic fields to show fields based on selections made earlier in the form. This eliminates the confusion of traditional dependent fields. 

8. Collecting Unstructured Data

Do you have a need for collecting unstructured data, such as free form responses? With the advent of natural language processing, Majime can implement solutions to capture meaning. We can also use methods such as pattern matching to find data within unstructured text. Our Intelligent Capture Software can pull unstructured data with a high degree of accuracy and confidence. At Majime we use artificial intelligence to flag instances in need of QA and then use those answers to increase accuracy in the future. So even if your customers are providing unstructured data in one of your forms, you can still use automated systems to increase your efficiency.

Are you still someone who thinks a paper system is a better choice than a digitized one? If these points have made you rethink your position and you’re ready to take your business to the next level through a paperless system, Majime is here to guide you through the process. Do you want to see more? If so, we provide a free demonstrations, education, and consultations in automation.