Forms Professionals: Advocates for the Customer

By Lisa Lee, CEBS,FLMI
Association President

Today, there is wide acceptance of the importance of the "customer experience." In fact, my family surprised me one day by sounding off about an "experience" they had at a retail spot. It’s remarkable to me how the term has seeped into our everyday language.

Of course, "customer experience" refers to the sum total of a customer’s impression based on their interactions with an organization. One customer touch point, or channel, to consider is forms. Forms are an important – and sometimes only – point of contact customers have with an organization. That point of contact becomes a moment of truth.

The person filling the form develops an unconscious impression as the task proceeds. Does the form provide all the instructions and information needed to complete it? Is it easy to understand and follow? Is it easy to use? Does it gather all the appropriate information? If the answer to such questions is no, the external customer may become frustrated, leading to a negative experience associated with the organization. That has a cost. In addition, the form may be completed poorly (leading to increased costs caused by missing or inaccurate data) or even abandoned (leading to lost business or delayed transactions). Internal customers, if frustrated, may resort to creating their own versions of forms, resulting in proliferation of redundant forms and increased costs.

In my observation, forms professionals have been advocates for the person filling that form – the customer – long before general awareness grew about the importance of the customer experience. In this way, forms professionals were ahead of the curve. What forms people bring to the organization is empathy for the person who has to understand the form well enough to provide the information the organization needs.

Forms capture data to feed business processes and they document business transactions. In order to do so effectively, the form must be designed with the end user in mind, and tested. After all, a form is actually a type of business communication. The party designing the form has a duty to give the party filling the form a fighting chance of doing so successfully!

I’ve often seen a forms analyst examine a request from a business unit, put themselves in the shoes of the person filling the form, and return to the requestor to modify the form until it works for both parties. In this way, the forms professional becomes the customer’s advocate within the organization, working to make that form easy to use before it ever gets deployed.

This empathy leads naturally to a desire to produce forms that work well for users, which then leads naturally to a positive customer experience, which is a benefit for any organization.

Empathy with that person filling the form sparks interest in effective communication, design, branding, usability, etc. If you identify with this perspective, please know that you can find other people passionate about these issues at Symposium, as well as relevant sessions to learn more. If you care about your organization’s face to the customer, we would love to swap ‘experiences’! Customer advocates, let's talk in San Jose!