One client, a construction inspection and safety service, faced shutting down its offices during the COVID-19 pandemic.
We were able to empower them to receive and process online applications, other documentation, and payments, all within a couple of weeks. So the client has been able to maintain operations.
Two factors enabled success. One is our team’s skill and experience in implementing complex workflows. The other is our use of proprietary no-code, low-code platforms that radically speed and simplify software customizations.
In New York, car dealers and auction houses must file paperwork with the state every time a vehicle is sold. This was a cumbersome, costly, paper-based process.
Enter WebINTENSIVE. We configured one of our proprietary workflow frameworks to digitize the submission and review process.
On the eve of our system going live, dealers and the state were juggling millions of paper forms. Two years later, this had already dropped by 75% to only 700,000 paper forms.
With COVID-19 compelling the state to shut down many offices, we quickly extended the system to empower an entirely paperless process, enabling car sales to continue.
A few years back, we architected and engineered a virtual reality focus group service for one of our clients, a leading legal services provider. The system lets real people playing the role of jurors from the comfort of their homes watch and evaluate lawyers’ presentations so the lawyers can prep for trial.
We’ve maintained and made incremental enhancements ever since. So when COVID-19 came, requiring shutdowns of physical offices across the country, we were able to help our client continue business as usual.
Reaching new customers and staying close to existing clients is a crucial challenge in these days of social distancing and increasingly distributed workforces. Zoom’s ubiquity these days paradoxically leaves it under-explored as a marketing tool.
One client, a global branding and marketing firm, recently hosted a series of chief marketing officer (CMO) roundtables on Zoom. We added a registration and special distribution list to keep potential guests apprised of events and to send links that enabled us track on the client’s behalf, who attended, not just registered. This equipped the client to reach out, learn more, and re-invite.
In an era of social distancing, more and more people are purchasing online. This is as true for business-to-business sales as it is for business-to-consumer sales. So how does a firm reach prospects today?
One proven method is through microsites. But these can take considerable time and effort to implement well.
While serving a national marketing firm, WebINTENSIVE honed a unique method for quickly creating compelling, targeted microsites by quickly white labelling popular contact management systems with our client’s branding. Their reach and mindshare was dramatically multiplied.
(This service is available, without extra charge, as part of a larger engagement.)
Tracking down and stopping cold fraudsters and thieves has long been a hybrid of detailed online forensics and old-school, on-site investigations for many organizations such as banks, insurance companies, warehouses, and government agencies.
Enter the COVID-19 shutdown, when in-person visits suddenly became unsafe. That didn't slow down our clients at a New York agency’s field investigation unit.
Our workflow system gave them real-time access to transaction data that they used to keep up their work, without a moment’s pause. More than 169 arrests have been made since the system went live.
Recent disruptions have driven more retail consumers online. This includes many who are ill-equipped by experience, preference, or technology to transact business on the Internet.
WebINTENSIVE can draw on broad and deep experience in supporting your newly cyber customers who really would prefer to deal with you in person.
Here’s just one case in point, from our work with a high-profile government agency. Their constituents needed to enroll to receive services. But the agency’s system did not support older, slower devices—or applicants who were not computer-literate. We implemented a system to enable 100% online enrollment, through an intuitive “wizard” that could guide novice users while offering richer interfaces to those who had the experience and tech to make the most of them.
Before WebINTENSIVE: An engineering firm’s senior management was spending too much time guiding engineers through architecture decisions, revising work product—and handling issues when mistakes slipped through.
Effectiveness Multiplied: WebINTENSIVE configured a workflow system that bakes in smart questions and guidance on proven, effective practices. The system also automatically documents all decisions in a central place, ready for fast review. This empowers junior team members to work more independently and lets experts and managers rapidly review what the team has been doing, down to the step-by-step level. In effect, it builds training into every process naturally.
Before WebINTENSIVE: A leading legal services provider saw an opportunity to extend its business online by offering a virtual reality focus group service, with real people playing the role of jurors watching and evaluating lawyers’ presentations.
Effectiveness Multiplied: We saw that success would hinge on providing the mock jurors with immersive experience so they could respond as they would in real life, letting lawyers hone their arguments and evidence for upcoming trials. So we set to work implementing live video broadcasting, enhanced virtual reality for evidence presentations and integrated VOIP telephony and automated recordings. Second-by-second polling reveals how jurors respond to what they see and hear in real time. Poll information, past persuasiveness levels and demographics help lawyers understand jurors’ reactions throughout the trial.
This potent service offering has helped the company win new business worth millions of dollars, while strengthening relationships with existing clients.
Before WebINTENSIVE: A system homegrown by a leading legal services firm ingested documents, distributed them across a range of reviewers, and provided an interface where reviewers contributed feedback.
Effectiveness Multiplied: The WebINTENSIVE system used machine learning to optimize the workflow for hundreds of reviewers by analyzing millions of documents to automatically anticipate which documents contained critical data and which specialists are best equipped to review them. So every hour that specialists spent became vastly more targeted and useful.
Before WebINTENSIVE: A system ingested scanned documents at a high-profile agency of a major U.S. city. The data in those documents had to be reviewed and verified through a largely manual, usually tedious process.
Effectiveness Multiplied: So we got our friendly robot to electronically capture scanned documents. In 90% of instances, it is able to automatically check the scanned data against data in external systems—even closed systems that do not expose APIs. When the need for human intervention in edge cases is detected, the robot automatically flags human reviewers. Otherwise, data are automatically entered into a third system.
Before WebINTENSIVE: In the high-stakes world of securities trading, every microsecond counts. But most traders rely on an SEC database called EDGAR to research filings. So an edge is hard to find.
Effectiveness Multiplied: We created a proprietary system that delivered and pre-analyzed relevant SEC filing information several seconds faster than was then available via commercial EDGAR services, giving our client a significant edge in conducting trades.
Before WebINTENSIVE: An international, household-name retailer was losing its battle for perception and mindshare to sleeker, hipper, more service-oriented competitors.
Effectiveness Multiplied: We transformed their in-store sales with a tablet app that empowers side-by-side interaction between retail reps and customers. The app pulls data from five different configured systems and instantly places thousands of product and pricing options in the clerks’ hands to support sales, up-selling and cross-selling—all in a highly personalized way. The app won an industry award for Best Advance in Learning Management Technology.
Before WebINTENSIVE: The management team of a global architecture firm gathered for their meeting every Monday morning at 8—and were missing project and invoicing information crucial for making near-term and long-term decisions.
Effectiveness Multiplied: We quickly saw that incomplete, unreviewed status reports from project managers were depriving the management team of essential information. But these project managers are highly busy people, juggling multiple time-critical responsibilities. So we engineered a Web-based project management tool that integrates with the client’s data management software.
Our tool coordinated the firm’s proprietary approach, displaying projects the way they thought of them; pulling in data from their other systems; automating processes; allowing for meaningful interactions and updates; and pushing data into their data management system and their accounting software, automatically. Today, reports are completed with a quarter of the effort—and the management team’s early weekly meetings are a whole lot more productive.
Before WebINTENSIVE: Many businesses succeed or fail based on enrollments, time-sensitive applications, subscriptions, or renewals. These include insurance companies, almost all purchased media, membership-driven non-profits, and more. While auto-renewals are a great boon, how do you maximize renewals among customers who don’t check that box? One of our clients has an enrollment process involving millions of applicants. In the past, they were required to manually send reminders to complete and send applications. It was a time drain for the business and meant too many applicants missed key deadlines when reminders were overlooked.
Effectiveness Multiplied: Timely application submission rose by 30% when the WebINTENSIVE system automated reminders. But that was just the start. The system also provides predictive analysis to suggest A/B testing of both the timing and the content of renewal messages to specific groups of applicants. And with graphic data displays, they can keep a visual track of results and fine-tune accordingly. The rate of on-time submission continues to rise.
Before WebINTENSIVE: When thinking about business secret weapons,“matching algorithms” might not be first to spring to mind. But their use springboards a truly wide range of enterprises to success. These include manufacturers, personnel agencies, and hospitals looking to optimize staffing, as well as retailers wanting to put timely, relevant content at their website visitors’ fingertips. One of our clients had an adequate matching system in place, but recommendations came slowly and without high accuracy.
Effectiveness Multiplied: We crafted an algorithm based on the Nobel Prize-winning Gale-Shapely algorithm and made a number of optimizations based on the client’s needs to improve its speed and accuracy. The matching process yielded first choices more than 50% of the time, at 100 times the speed.
Before WebINTENSIVE: Many firms rely on third-party agents, channel partners, and re-sellers to generate revenue. Such is the case at one of our public sector clients who uses private-sector third parties to sell products. In part due to high turnover among these agents’ staff, many mistakes were made—creating extra work for our client’s hardworking team.
Effectiveness Multiplied: Working closely with our client, we identified the situations that led to the greatest numbers of errors. Starting there—then expanding—we configured the workflow system to intelligently present checks and questions, based on specific nuanced criteria that massively reduced errors and bad transactions. Furthermore, the workflows were supported with a unique low-code/no-code system, so, should regulations or processes change, our client has the power to adapt, often within minutes, in most cases all on their own.
Before WebINTENSIVE: A public entity was spending significant time and tax-payer dollars in reviewing long applications for permits for very complex projects—projects that have serious and very public consequences should there be mistakes.
Effectiveness Multiplied: We implemented a system to automate the submission and review process, baking in situational help and visual training. Most crucially, we intelligently guided submitters and reviewers to best practices that help ensure faster reviews and support positive outcomes of the projects themselves.
Before WebINTENSIVE: A major international business consultancy saw an opportunity to help its client bank price loans in a new way that’s simultaneously competitive and profitable.
Effectiveness Multiplied: We created a mobile app that empowers loan officers to enter inputs and identify pricing that maximizes profits while still being cost-competitive.
Before WebINTENSIVE: A range of for-profit and public utilities and public entities (phone and internet service companies, DMVs, power companies, contractors) have long struggled with providing exemplary customer service. One of our clients in this space came to us for help in turning things around.
Effectiveness Multiplied: Based on a review of aggregated psychographics of the target audience (young adults) we saw an opportunity to do better: we drew on principles of gamification for an online customer service platform. The platform’s interfaces are intuitive, of course, and transactions are super-fast. Gamified features keep the users informed of their exact status and acknowledge when steps have been accomplished. The platform earned 98% user satisfaction.
Before WebINTENSIVE: As part of our implementing an ERP, a client in the automotive industry needed its legacy billing system replaced with fast, modern, easy invoicing functionality. Commercial third-party products were considered—but they came with many more features than the client needed, even at the lowest subscriptions, and required standardization around their processes.
Effectiveness Multiplied: We created invoicing features that meet the client’s workflow exactly—but with automations that dramatically speed up their process, compared with their old system. Today the invoices go out with 70% less effort.
Before WebINTENSIVE: News flash: kids don’t like getting shots and don’t fancy being singled out from their peers in a potentially stigmatizing way. These were barriers to adoption faced by a pharmaceutical firm bringing a new anti-allergy product for elementary school age children to market.
Effectiveness Multiplied: We leveraged insights into patient psychology and an understanding of both key messages and patients’ objections. We then staged the apps’ interactions and messages in a way that engages and persuades. We also optimized interface presentation to guide eyes and thoughts and to omit non-contributing elements. We wouldn’t go so far as to say the app made the kids happy about the shots, but it did measurably improve their comfort with the situation.
Before WebINTENSIVE: At bustling professional services companies like law firms, engineers, architects, plumbers, marketing agencies, business consultancies and so many others, time, literally, is money. At one such firm, a system sent a text alert to IT when one of their networked copy machines or printers went on the blink.
Effectiveness Multiplied: Our proactive system not only (optionally) texts or emails IT when a machine is down—it warns them before the machine goes down, so they can address the problem before their friends on the business side get bottlenecked. It does this by sending color-coded messages based on certain triggers that signal a need for maintenance. The result: a 60% reduction in machines going down.
Before WebINTENSIVE: A multibillion-dollar hardware supplier needed to speed up a complex work process by helping staff find specific data quickly and keep a specialized business database up to date. As a dataware housing supplier, it really mattered how they managed their own data.
Effectiveness Multiplied: Our solution included a custom database and a Web-based search tailored to the client’s unique workflow, with the ability to display trends and geolocation data in graphic form. The powerful search system incorporates many relevancy algorithms and heuristics to distinguish more relevant from less relevant results.
Automated validation and data quality checks help ensure particular data are reliable and safe, while matching algorithms help determine which records and values to update. With its highly intuitive Web-based interfaces, the system requires relatively little training to use. The client now has a far better way to manage a crucial aspect of its business, while fostering higher productivity and lowering administrative costs.
