Business interactions with customers who increasingly rely on mobile devices are especially complex. The new version of Kofax's TotalAgility has been extended to let businesses create and manage so-called "customer facing" mobile apps.
These apps are aimed at what Forrester Research calls "human-based activities," including collaborative tasks such as onboarding a new customers, claims processing, managing the life cycle of a contract, and customer service. In all of these, customers are directly, actively involved. TotalAgility 7.0 integrates previously separate Kofax products and adds new functions to what had been mainly software for business process management and information integration with backend ERP and CRM applications.
Version 7.0 adds features in three areas: support for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets; information capture, via a home scanner or smartphone camera for example; and analytics that track a businesses' interaction with its customers. For example, in a mortgage loan process based on TotalAgility 7.0, a customer can use their smartphone camera to snap a photo of a pay stub or other document and press a button to submit with a loan application. TotalAgility automatically strips the information from the image, populates an electronic form.
[RELATED:20 free PC apps to ease daily tasks]
[MORE:9 of the Hottest Mobile Development Skills
These new capabilities reflect a change in enterprise priorities, which in past focused on large-scale, backend, core enterprise applications, according to Dermot McCauley, vice president of solutions product marketing at Kofax. But today, customers are mobile and social and want companies to interact with them in both respects, he says. It's about "pushing actions out to the end customers," McCauley says.
Version 7.0 can be sold as a development platform, which businesses can use to build their own specific customer-facing applications, or as the skeleton for one or more Kofax-created applications including Accounts Payable Automation, Mortgage Automation, Customer Onboarding and Mailroom Automation. Kofax plans to release at least six such packages over the next 18 months.
TotalAgility now can be licensed as an on-premises server or as a cloud service, with pricing based on the number of users and the number of documents processed. The new version is available now.
John Cox covers wireless networking and mobile computing for Network World.Twitter: http://twitter.com/johnwcoxnwwEmail: john_cox@nww.com
Read more about anti-malware in Network World's Anti-malware section.