How to Use Digital Intake as a Strategic Lever for Growth

Leveraging the Power of Digital Intake

In a digital-first economy, how customers engage with your business from the outset can either accelerate growth or stall it. The stakes are high. Without a seamless way for prospects to become customers online, businesses risk losing leads, wasting ad spend, and overburdening internal teams with manual tasks. Enter digital intake—a transformative approach to onboarding that can open up new growth channels, increase operational efficiency, and create a differentiated customer experience.

Listen in as LaunchPad Lab’s Stefanie Kulberg (VP, Marketing) and Ryan Francis (President and Partner) discuss what digital intake really is, the business value it unlocks, and how to maximize its impact. Whether you’re in healthcare, insurance, financial services, or manufacturing, this guide outlines how digital intake, powered by custom software, can turn your front door into a high-converting revenue engine.

What Is Digital Intake?

Digital intake is the process of converting a lead into a customer through an entirely digital interaction. It’s what allows a potential customer to self-serve—to initiate, provide information, and move through a process without having to speak to someone.

Think about a new patient scheduling an appointment with a doctor online. That experience—filling out health concerns, selecting services, checking insurance eligibility—is digital intake. While it may appear simple, the data capture and flow behind the scenes are anything but. When done right, this experience is seamless, informative, and personalized—all critical for conversion.

A Closer Look at the Top Use Cases Across Industries

Digital intake is industry-agnostic. Any organization that interacts with clients, customers, or patients stands to benefit. A few examples:

• Healthcare: Patients schedule appointments, enter health history, and verify insurance—all before stepping foot in the office.
  
• Financial Services: New clients complete investor profiles and submit documentation digitally, creating a sophisticated first impression.
  
• Insurance: Prospects request quotes by providing driver and vehicle details, coverage preferences, and get a policy preview in minutes.
• Manufacturing: Buyers can interact with AI agents to get quotes for parts, review pricing in real-time, and even complete purchases—no sales rep required.

How Digital Intake Delivers Business Value

Digital intake isn’t just about convenience—it’s about competitive advantage. Here are five key business outcomes a strong digital intake process can deliver:

1. Customer Acquisition at Scale: Digital intake acts as your “digital front door.” When done right, it becomes a conversion-optimized pathway for new customers. Pair this with paid media campaigns—Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram—and you amplify ROI. A better conversion rate justifies higher ad spend and outperforms competitors with weaker digital funnels.

2. Operational Scalability: Manual data collection—often done via phone—is not only time-consuming but also error-prone. Digital intake automates this, allowing you to onboard customers without needing to grow your team proportionally.

3. Reduced Costs: Eliminating human touchpoints where they aren’t needed drives down overhead. Your team spends less time collecting data and more time adding value.

4. Higher Data Accuracy: No more “fat-fingering” forms over the phone. Customers input their own data directly, accurately, and efficiently.

5. Modern Brand Experience: Today’s customers expect online self-service. A modern intake process reflects a modern brand, positioning you as a company worth doing business with.

3 Ways to Make the Most of Digital Intake

A great digital intake process isn’t just functional—it’s intentional. Here’s how to build one that delivers:

1. Design for Brand and Audience

Digital intake should reflect your brand. A financial advisory firm needs a professional, trustworthy interface. A tech startup? Maybe something more edgy and vibrant. No matter the vertical, the experience must be intuitive, responsive, and aligned with user expectations.

2. Choose the Right Experience Model

Most digital intakes follow one of two approaches:

• Step Forms: Linear, guided flows (e.g., “Get a Quote”) where each step captures specific data—perfect for structured processes like insurance.
  
• Conversational AI: Dynamic, chat-style experiences where AI agents guide the user, ask contextual questions, and adapt in real time—ideal for more complex, variable interactions.

3. Leverage AI to Extend Reach

AI-powered intake isn’t just novel—it’s efficient. Like training a salesperson, businesses can train AI agents to gather all the necessary information and deliver output like custom quotes or order summaries, on demand, 24/7.

Deliver More Value with Strategic Digital Intake

Digital intake is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s a strategic capability that drives growth, cuts costs, and positions your brand for modern customer expectations. Whether it’s a step form that drives conversions or an AI agent that simulates your best salesperson, the goal remains the same: enable customers to become customers—fast, seamlessly, and at scale.

Book a 1:1 with our team today to discover how digital intake could transform your business!

Read the Transcript

STEFANIE KULBERG: Hi, everybody. I am Stefanie Kulberg, the Vice President of Marketing here at Launchpad Lab. And along with me today is Ryan Francis, President and Partner at Launchpad Lab. We are here to talk about digital intake. We’re exploring all different sort of avenues of custom software development. And today, we’re gonna dig into the digital intake process.

STEFANIE KULBERG: So, Ryan, thank you first for taking the time to talk. I would love to just start by explaining what digital intake is. For those who may not be familiar with the term or understand what it is, I think that would just help kick things off.

RYAN FRANCIS: Alright. So, digital intake, what is the use case of digital intake? So digital intake is really about how do you as a company, enable customers to go through the process of becoming a customer through a digital process. So a lot of people call this, like, a digital front door. So imagine a doctor’s office has on their website an opportune a way for potential new patients to go through and book an appointment, and kind of put in their information, like their insurance details to ensure that they are eligible, to go to that doctor’s office.

RYAN FRANCIS: That process, while it sounds simple, can actually be quite complicated. You know, in the example of a doctor’s office, you need to put in what you’re, you know, looking to what service you’re interested in. If it’s a general checkup, if you have a certain condition that you’re looking to get looked at, if you have a certain doctor that you preference, and then you have to determine whether or not your insurance is a good fit for that doctor’s office.

STEFANIE KULBERG: So Interesting. I can totally picture that whole process. I’ve been through that myself many times. In terms of businesses, why is this something that’s essential, that’s critical, that they need to have as part of their process when they’re creating a bespoke piece of software?

RYAN FRANCIS: Digital intake is a important part of any company in today’s day and age. Customers expect to be able to, do things online. They don’t wanna have to call in if if they don’t have to. And in many cases, the digital prowess of a company determines whether or not customers want to engage with them at all.

STEFANIE KULBERG: Excellent point. Especially concerning the fact that every business right now has some sort of digital presence, so you wanna make sure that that it’s valuable. So speaking of that, I’d love to hear your perspective on the business value that digital intake offers.

RYAN FRANCIS: So, digital intake enables a few things. From a business value perspective, digital intake can help customers grow, by bringing in a whole new channel of new leads. So if you have a really good digital intake process, then you’ll have a better opportunity to do things like search engine optimization, search engine marketing, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Instagram Ads. Because as you invest in, say, in a Google Ads campaign, you’re paying for someone to visit your website. If you have a high conversion rate, if a high percentage of those people who visit your website end up getting through your whole digital intake process and becoming an actual customer, the value, the ROI on your initial investment to do that advertising goes up and allows you to be more competitive when you bid online.

RYAN FRANCIS: So you’ll have the opportunity to increase your bids relative to your competitors because your conversion rate is higher. You can justify spending a little bit more per click for someone to visit your website than your competitor, who has a nonexistent digital funnel, a digital intake funnel, or a lackluster digital intake process.

STEFANIE KULBERG: I love that, especially because businesses should and typically are focused on having some sort of competitive edge or competitive advantage. On that note, I’d love to hear your perspective and talk a little bit about the benefits. What are they? How is this impactful for businesses?

RYAN FRANCIS: So, yeah, the first business benefit as to why digital intake is valuable is in is in growth, is in driving new customers through your front door, your digital front door into your business.

RYAN FRANCIS: The second big benefit is in time savings. Many companies today don’t have a great digital intake process, and what they rely on is humans on their team collecting data from customers in a more manual way. This is gonna be prone to errors. It’s gonna be prone to people fat-fingering important information, and it’s time-consuming.

RYAN FRANCIS: A lot of times, this happens over a long phone call. Someone might might have to, you know, kinda guess at what the person is saying, if it’s hard to understand what they’re saying. So a digital intake process can create more scalability in your business in the sense that you don’t need as many humans to drive revenue into into the organization.

RYAN FRANCIS: So growth, scalability, bringing down costs, these are all things that a great digital intake process can really help with.

STEFANIE KULBERG: Definitely three things that businesses should and do care about. I’d love to shift a little bit towards the how. So if you’re a business and you’re thinking to yourself, considering doing this, what really distinguishes good from great?

RYAN FRANCIS: As far as, like, what makes a great digital intake experience, I think there’s a few things that come into this. So every business is gonna have a different brand, a different experience that they wanna create for their customers. If you’re in the financial services space, you’re gonna wanna have an experience that feels professional, feels, thoughtful and, comprehensive.

RYAN FRANCIS: So if someone comes in and they’re going through a digital intake, they’re answering questions about their investor profile, you’re understanding their net worth, those kinds of things as they’re filling that out. And it should have a look and feel that that feels professional, like you’d expect from a financial adviser.

RYAN FRANCIS: It’s very different from the look and feel you might expect from a startup who has a new dating app or something like that. You know, that look and feel is gonna feel more exciting, more edgy. It might have a more unique UX.

RYAN FRANCIS: But in all of these cases, the structure, the overall functionality, takes similar shapes. You typically have a step form where the customer will hit some type of a button on your marketing site, like get a quote. That’s a typical button. So, imagine in I’ll use the example of insurance.

RYAN FRANCIS: You’re an insurance company. You wanna create a digital intake process that allows a consumer to get a quote for an auto insurance policy. So you come into their this auto insurance company’s website, you click get a quote, and you’re taken to a step form experience where you can basically provide the information that the business needs to ultimately give you a quote. So you go through a series of pages.

RYAN FRANCIS: Each page collects different information. The first page might wanna understand how many vehicles you’re looking to get insured. It might wanna understand what those vehicles are, the VIN numbers. It might wanna understand the drivers.

RYAN FRANCIS: So as you go through this step form, you’re filling out each of those kinds of pieces of information. And then once it collects, once you get through collecting enough information, the business is then able to create a quote of here’s what your insurance premium will be based on all the criteria set up, including the coverages that you want and things like that. So then the final step in that process might be to talk to an agent to get that insurance policy written. Honestly, even for that insurance example, you could take that digital intake all the way through in some situations to actually signing the policy.

RYAN FRANCIS: But that’s that’s kind of, you know, where there’s some regulation in that industry that, you know, may or may not make that possible. But digital intake is basically the idea of in an ideal world, and insurance, you would completely intake the customer and get them set up with a policy without human intervention all digitally.

STEFANIE KULBERG: I imagine a lot of people listening today can relate because they’ve all had that sort of intake experience going through that step form. What other cases are you seeing emerge? We’ve talked amongst ourselves, and I’d love to hear you share this with others who might be interested on how AI is sort of influencing this intake process and how businesses can use that to their advantage.

RYAN FRANCIS: So Stepform is sort of the first typical way that a digital intake process happens. Another newer way that digital intake is happening is conversational intake. So what this entails is basically having an AI have a conversation with the customer to intake them into the organization. So this is a natural language chat experience that happens on the website where someone says, “Yes.” I’m interested, and they’re having a two-way conversation with an AI agent who is helping to build a package for that customer. Let’s say a business is a manufacturing company that sells parts.

RYAN FRANCIS: A customer comes into this company’s website and is interested in buying parts. They could have a conversation with an agent who builds out a quote for them. So they go through they they talk to the agent, and the agent is in the background building out a set of SKUs, quantities, pricing, and then ultimately, the final step in that conversation is that, hey. Here, I went ahead and created a quote for you.

RYAN FRANCIS: You can review it here, and that’s an actual PDF that the customer can look at with the quote built out. They can then basically take payment and go ahead and process the order. Right? So that AI agent-based digital intake is sort of a new way of intaking customers, and that goes a step further than the traditional step form approach, and it’s a less structured way to intake customers. You can allow AI agents to ask dynamic questions.

STEFANIE KULBERG: Wow. Thanks, Ryan. Lots of lots of lessons learned there. Thank you to those of you who tuned in to listen. We hope you found this valuable.