Your business has probably had to adapt because of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. Perhaps your interactions with potential customers have been limited. Perhaps your business has been closed to the public. Because of COVID-19, or other needs, you are looking for new ways to interact with your customers digitally. For businesses that utilize Adobe Experience Manager® (AEM), one of those new interaction methods could be an adoption (or expanded use) of Adobe Experience Manager Forms.

What is Adobe Experience Manager Forms?

In the same way that Adobe Experience Manager Sites handles content management, and Adobe Experience Manager Assets manages digital assets, Adobe Experience Manager Forms (AEM Forms) manages digital enrollments with your customers. AEM Forms is a powerful tool, and is much more powerful than the old process of answering questions on a printed form or a static Portable Document Format (PDF) file.

AEM Forms offers a number of benefits to your customers:

• Enrollment takes place on the customer’s preferred platform, since AEM Forms supports multiple web browsers and multiple device types (computer, tablet, or smartphone). You don’t have to wait for customers to find the “right” device to start interacting with your company’s website.
• Enrollment takes place according to the customer’s schedule, since AEM Forms allows the customer to submit the form immediately, or wait until later without having to start over.
• Enrollment is easy, since AEM Forms eliminates duplicate entry by pre-populating form fields with information from customer or social media accounts.
• Enrollment is tailored to the customer, since AEM Forms asks customers the right questions by personalizing forms and adjusting form options based upon customer interaction. Again, this is much more powerful than the static forms that were previously used.

These enrollment benefits reduce the friction of enrollment, lessen the chance of abandonment of the enrollment process, and make customers more likely to sign up with your business.

AEM Forms also benefits the business itself by making forms easy to create, allowing conversion of existing PDF files to AEM Forms, and incorporating other features that allow forms to be created and modified quickly. This leads to faster responses to and from customers, benefiting the bottom line.

Marin County, California was a user of the older Adobe LiveCycle product. However, this product did not have the full mobile device support that the county’s citizens demanded. Marin County upgraded to AEM Forms, allowing citizens with smartphones to file consumer complaints, apply to vote by mail, and apply for annual park passes. And all of this can be done without having to visit a Marin County government office.

How can AEM Forms provide business and government continuity?

Because customers can fill out AEM Forms from anywhere on a smartphone or other device, and because the forms can adapt based upon the customer responses to questions, businesses and governments can continue to conduct business even if offices are closed or call center staff is unavailable. As long as the system back-end is secure—for example, stored on redundant cloud locations—it can continue to receive customer submissions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Even a cellular network or wi-fi outage does not cripple submissions, since they can be stored offline and submitted when network access is restored.

Businesses that continue to maintain service levels during the COVID-19 pandemic, or during a similar interruption in business such as a weather disaster, are less likely to suffer significant the significant revenue losses that have impacted many businesses in 2020. Continued service levels result in happy customers, and profits.

How can Adobe LiveCycle users receive the power of AEM Forms?

Marin County is not the only customer that was using Adobe LiveCycle. There are customers that are still on the LiveCycle platform, despite the fact that Adobe stopped offering extended technical support for Adobe LiveCycle in March 2020. AEM Forms offers significant innovations that are not available in the Adobe LiveCycle, including expanded capabilities for today’s smartphone-using customers.

So how can a LiveCycle customer upgrade to AEM Forms? It is technically possible to migrate to AEM Forms, but the process requires more than technical knowledge. Any AEM implementation requires knowledge of both the technology and the business requirements, and a process to ensure that the migration meets your business goals.

An experienced AEM consultant can guide your business on the best upgrade path to move to the new AEM Forms platform. KBWEB Consult offers extensive expertise in the Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Platform, and can guide your business in the steps and the personnel required to upgrade from Adobe LiveCycle to AEM Forms. Contact us for a free consultation.

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