Back to basics: how eSignatures could help your business

There’s nothing better than that ‘aha’ moment when someone finally sees the true value of your product or service. As in, ‘Wow, this will save me so much time.’ Or, ‘I had no idea how simple it was to set up.’ At DocuSign, we regularly hold back to basics webinars for people who are new to the concept of eSignatures and new to DocuSign. It’s where many ‘aha’ moments happen.

In case you haven’t been able to attend a webinar or prefer reading instead of listening, let’s recap on the basics of eSignatures and DocuSign here – and hopefully generate a few more of those golden ‘aha’ moments for those of you who are new to this technology.

First, what’s wrong with paper-based agreements?

Businesses of all shapes and sizes run on agreements. These agreements are everywhere – from your sales contract to your non-disclosure agreement to your employment contract. Every function of every business is underpinned by agreements that require some form of consent between two or more parties.

When the agreements are super simple, then it might seem easy just to print it out and hand over to someone else for signing. But there are a handful of drawbacks, even for one-pagers. First, there’s the environmental impact of printing. Then, there’s the time and effort of getting that piece of paper from person one to person two if they’re not in the same room. Finally, there’s the storage of that piece of paper. For one single agreement, these impacts are minimal. But when you’re creating these documents every day in your business, the impact adds up.

Once agreements become more complex – perhaps requiring multiple signatories or negotiations before arriving at a version that everyone agrees upon – then the paper-based approach becomes much more unwieldy. Tracking changes to documents, getting those changes out to everyone, having people re-sign bits that have changed … version control becomes version chaos.

These manual processes are not made for the speed of business today. Anything that slows you down puts you at risk of falling behind your competitors. What’s more, manual, slow and paper-based processes are no longer acceptable to consumers. Put simply, people hate them.

How do eSignatures and DocuSign solve the problem?

Instead of waiting days for an agreement to be signed and returned to you, with DocuSign 80% of agreements are signed in 24 hours and, of these, a further 50% are completed in an hour. DocuSign’s award-winning platform strips out all of the complexity of getting agreements signed, sealed and delivered – significantly streamlining and accelerating the task of doing business. It holds the title of the world’s #1 electronic signing solution for good reason.

Users of DocuSign praise its simplicity and flexibility. Once inside the DocuSign portal, it’s easy to set up a new ‘envelope’ (DocuSign’s name for the container that holds the agreement or transaction that you’re signing). Then, you gain access to rich features like:

• Two-factor authentication for recipients of the envelope
• Templates to speed up the creation of new envelopes
• Document workflow management, so you can set out the order in which a document needs to be signed
• Automatic reminders to follow up on people who haven’t signed yet
• The ability to create conditional fields in documents
• Confidentiality, or the ability to control who sees what information in an agreement
• And much more

All these features are easy to use – much easier, yet much more technologically advanced, than printing, scanning, faxing and posting documents here, there and everywhere.

Aha, a secure certificate of completion

One of the great ‘aha’ moments always comes when people see the certificate of completion that’s generated when a document is signed. This certificate is a concise report of all the actions that have been completed – including the signers’ names, email addresses, IP addresses, signatures and time stamps.

The certificates also include tamper-evident seals. These prevent users from jumping back in to edit the document once it has been signed. This extra layer of security is reassuring for customers who may have held concerns about digital signing – it’s the proof they need that a digitally signed document can’t be tampered with and is, in fact, a lot more secure than a piece of paper.

Try it yourself

To learn more about how the DocuSign eSignature solution could accelerate agreements, eliminate manual handling, and save your business time and money, start a free trial today.