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4 Strategies for Enhanced Decision-Making

Stefanie Jansen |
April 4, 2024
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5
Min Read

How often do you rely on a gut feeling to make decisions? Once you make them, are you left holding your breath and crossing your fingers that they result in positive outcomes? It may be time to rethink your decision-making strategies. For one, companies who are data-driven outperform their competitors by up to 20%.

Looking to become a data-driven organization? Here are a couple of the big hurdles to overcome and how Formstack makes the transition easy.

Hurdle #1: Data-Driven Processes Are Applied Inconsistently

So you make the decision to become a data-driven organization. Depending on how large your organization is, this can be a huge undertaking. If you don’t consistently apply data-driven approaches across the entire organization, inefficiencies become like potholes—unavoidable and costly. Only a small portion of the vast amount of data available can actually be collected, processed, queried, and analyzed in real time. As a result, valuable insights that could drive informed decision making and improve overall business performance often go untapped.

Seamlessly Integrate Across Your Business

Formstack keeps you ahead of the curve. With our extensive integration capabilities, we can facilitate a seamless journey from data collection to data analysis. Formstack connects with more than 260 third-party integrations like Salesforce and Google to pull your valuable data into forms, documents, and signatures. Then, analyze it or store it conveniently without flipping between systems, streamlining workflow processes and boosting productivity. 

Hurdle #2: Branding Gets Lost 

Consumers want to get personal. In fact, 71% expect companies to deliver tailored experiences. This benefits everyone, as personalization can actually drive 40% higher business performance and better customer outcomes. 

But meeting these expectations can be challenging. Customers now interact with brands across various devices, touchpoints, email addresses, and sales channels, making it difficult to maintain consistency. Instead, it creates a disjointed customer experience.

Optimize Form Design

Formstack's highly customizable forms give you a way to align your forms to your brand identity, creating a consistent user experience. By A/B testing different layouts and designs, you can optimize form performance and enhance user engagement—before you launch. Additionally, Formstack’s Conditional Logic allows you to tailor forms based on user responses in real time, ensuring a personalized and efficient data collection process.

Hurdle #3: Submissions are Abandoned

Sometimes, users start to fill out a form, but for various reasons, they fail to complete it. You get it—you’re a consumer too, after all. But it leaves businesses with incomplete datasets and missed opportunities. This issue is particularly prevalent in sectors such as marketing, where following up on potential leads is essential. It can happen in healthcare and education too, where understanding user experiences can significantly enhance services. Is there an easier way that can suit everyone?

Gather Partial Submissions

With Formstack, you don’t have to wait on full submissions to access the data. Our Partial Submissions feature gathers valuable insights, even from incomplete form responses. This can unveil patterns and trends that might otherwise be overlooked. For a marketing team, this could mean a follow-up with someone who really is interested, but just got sidetracked. For healthcare, it could mean identifying crucial needs before it’s too late.

Hurdle #4: Manual Processes Create Untimely Data

Governments and organizations set rules to ensure sensitive information is handled responsibly, protecting privacy and keeping data secure. However, manual processes make it harder to effectively manage, recover, and safeguard data in a comprehensive and timely way. Plus, it leads to mistakes, delays, and lapses in security, making it challenging to respond quickly to evolving data threats. How can you possibly balance following the rules with effectively safeguarding your data?

Get HIPAA Compliant Analytics

Formstack's Analytics feature derives meaningful insights from collected data. Visualize trends, identify patterns, and make informed decisions based on comprehensive analyses. Each form on our platform is not only user-friendly, but supports your HIPAA compliance, ensuring the secure handling of sensitive information. Our platform also offers powerful reporting tools, allowing you to generate presentation-ready data through visually appealing and comprehensible graphics.

Real Life Data-Driven Success

St. John's University was previously reliant on paper. But with paper, you can only capture data at the moment you have it. In 2020, the organization adapted to remote work by eliminating paper with email and phone communications. However, the reliance on emails proved inefficient over time, leading to submission errors and communication bottlenecks. And you can’t be a data-driven organization with bad or incomplete data. 

Recognizing the need for innovation, Kevin James, the Director of Fiscal and Administrative Affairs, proposed a switch to Formstack. In a short span, all processes were transferred to Formstack Workflows, providing students with a centralized access point for tasks like major changes and leave of absence applications. The outcome was overwhelmingly positive, with 84% of students expressing a preference for the streamlined Formstack submission process in a post-update survey.

Formstack Leaps Over Data Hurdles

Data-driven companies are at a substantial competitive advantage—especially as we head into a data-forward, AI-ready world. Transitioning to a data-driven organization can have its hurdles, from inconsistent application of data-driven processes to the risk of abandoned form submissions. But Formstack easily addresses these challenges by ensuring consistent application, providing valuable insights from partial submissions, and seamlessly integrating data across a number of platforms. 

Ready to swap hunches for data-driven decision making? Start a 14-day Formstack trial or request a demo today.

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Stefanie Jansen |
Stefanie is a marketing writer with specialties in blogging, website writing, and copy editing. She has worked with a number of tech companies and has experience in the areas of email, marketing campaigns, and employee engagement. Connect with Stefanie at word4wordwriting.com.
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