Ten Ways the COVID-19 Pandemic Changes the Capture Market

In the last few months we have witnessed a material acceleration of a number of market dynamics for the Capture market.

COVID-19 continues to accelerate the Digital Transformation megatrend. Companies that were further ahead in changing their processes from manual to digital were less impacted by the pandemic in the past two quarters. Going forward this will increase the priority business leaders will assign to Digital Transformation investments in the short-and mid-term future.

Response time increasingly impacts customer loyalty. The mix of communication channels has accelerated considerably in the last few months, which created challenges for organizations in particular during lock-downs. At the same time customer expectations for fast and comprehensive responses continue to increase. Surveys show an increasing willingness to switch providers, hence slow or incomplete responses may result in losing a customer.

The pandemic accelerates the shift from paper to digital business inputs in particular in a B2C business environment and in government agencies. During lockdowns many organizations were forced to accept digital inputs from customers, prospects and citizens, who were not able to submit paper-based forms and documentation as they were accustomed to. Responding to client preferences and operational changes organizations will increasingly allow or even encourage digital inputs.

Mobile devices become a more important input source for paper-based business inputs. Knowledge workers as well as clients, who were not able to submit or process paper documents increasingly turned to their smart devices to capture documents and email, text or submit them electronically.

Business inputs increasingly move to multi-channel inputs, an existing trend which has accelerated since the start of the pandemic. For many end customers exchanging photos, videos and text messages is part of their everyday life. As they turn to their smart devices to capture documents to submit to their business partners adding voice, photo and video inputs in applications like P&C insurance claims is a natural next step. The increased popularity of Telemedicine also triggers the increased use of voice and video. 

The corona pandemic boosts the acceptance of digital signatures. While digital signatures are considered mature technology, acceptance has been very slow before the start of the pandemic. But in the past few months vendors of digital signature solutions have seen a record demand. The pandemic will move the acceptance of digital signature technology over the threshold and further accelerate the shift from paper to digital inputs in business applications where signatures were a key reason for staying with paper inputs. 

Security requirements generate additional authentication requirements. In remote customer interactions the capture of ID cards and video identification allow to authenticate individuals for example in interactions with banks augmenting existing home banking authentication processes. As end customer interactions with banks and financial institutions will continue to shift to digital, this will trigger additional authentication requirements for highly confidential interactions.

Cloud solutions have become essential to support work-from-home. When knowledge workers were required to work from home for extended periods of time, this exposed organizations who were not set up accordingly. It created a bottle neck especially in document intensive business applications where capturing business inputs is an essential element of the business transaction that these knowledge workers need to manage. Even after the pandemic remote work is going to remain prominent in many organizations.

The demand for subscription-based Capture solutions is accelerating. The pandemic has further accelerated the shift from CAPEX to OPEX type investments. The need to scale down (during a lock-down) or up (as demand recovers) requires an unprecedented level of flexibility for organizations and increases the shift to subscription type Capture solutions. SaaS type solutions will continue to gain popularity. 

The acceleration of digitization will trigger more standards. The explosion of data has resulted in legislation and standardization efforts over the past years, mostly at a country level. With the exponential acceleration of document digitization and the exchange of digital inputs it is even more important to ensure quality standards and align them across country borders. 

The longer the pandemic lasts and second (and potentially third) waves of lock-downs impact businesses and government agencies, the stronger and more permanent the above-mentioned changes are going to be.