If you’ve been following along, you know the Aerogami Team is a big fan of the PDF format. It’s arguably the most familiar format on the web with billions of different copies being circulated every day. It’s also the format of choice for our partners in the insurance and employee benefits spaces when it comes to delivering policy information or benefit packages to their customers.
But like most technologies, the PDF format can use an upgrade. Platforms like DocuSign have made tremendous progress in this department by making PDFs editable to host certain transactions like signing a document. In fact, most PDF innovation efforts have focused on making it easier to create, edit, and organize documents in general.
When it comes to accessing these documents on the go, these upgrades miss the moment. Sure, users can download a Dropbox or Google Drive to manage these documents on their phones but when it comes to products like insurance or benefit programs which contain interactive content hosted in these documents, a different upgrade is needed.
We’ve seen insurance and benefit companies develop their own mobile apps as an answer but unfortunately people are app’d out. Although people spend more time than ever on their mobile phone, the amount of new apps users download is decreasing with the average mobile app engaging 8-23% of their users. Bradley wrote a whole article covering this topic but the summary is, we’re seeing a change in how people use mobile apps and the headline is “they aren’t”.
Every insurance product sold comes with a document confirming the terms of coverage. The same is true for every benefit package offered to an employee or association member. These documents may contain elements like an ID card or a telephone tree of the different service numbers available.
The next upgrade for the PDF needs to focus on document interaction, not management. Embedding a mobile experience within the document itself providers direct access for customers to the resources they need if they want to use their policy or benefits package.
That’s where Aerogami comes in. Aerogami’s DigiDoc provides the innovation PDFs need to go from document management to total audience engagement. DigiDoc gives any PDF the features of a progressive web app (PWA for short). Now the documents customers need can be saved right to any smartphone’s home-screen, without forcing customers to visit to the app store. DigiDoc includes engagement benefits such as push notification, automatic updates, and every resource included becomes a clickable action, not a phone number that needs to be copy and pasted.
We often lean towards the complicated answer when it comes to innovation. Innovation often gets indirectly translated to the endless opportunity of “more” - more features, more data, more future possibilities (when we figure out what that is, right?). However, to achieve progress in adoption, we first need to build a bridge, not a space ship.
That’s why we believe in this jump in innovation for PDFs to PWAs. It’s a mark in progress to get users engaged with the products they often forget about, until they need them most.