Meet the customers who shone at the 2022 APAC Customer and Partner Awards

Want to know what an award-winning DocuSign customer looks like? Having recently announced the winners of our inaugural APAC Customer and Partner Awards, it’s now time to dive a little deeper into why our winners were chosen.

Let’s take a look at the winning entries to see why they got the gongs. And who knows? The entries below might just spark an idea for your own business and put you in the running for our 2023 awards.

Enterprise Customer of the Year: ADCO Constructions

This award recognised the DocuSign customer that enabled meaningful, digital transformation across their enterprise organisation. And ADCO certainly shone in this regard.

The construction company had developed a 10-year strategy to identify, adopt and embrace modern ways of working. As part of this, the team identified repetitive and time-intensive processes in the business – particularly around contract management for subcontractor and professional services agreements. It was completing around 250 of these per month, with each one about 87 pages.

Following a market evaluation, ADCO chose DocuSign to shift from a paper-based, highly administrative process to a digitally integrated contract management platform. Since making the switch, ADCO has saved over half a million printed pages, which has contributed significantly towards carbon offsets and the company’s sustainability commitments. It has also freed up 7,500 hours of administrative teams’ time, and transformed procurement and onboarding processes.

As Business Improvement Manager at ADCO Constructions, Max Homes-Keane said, “It cannot be understated the extent to which DocuSign has assisted ADCO in reaching our sustainability goals. DocuSign has enabled us to better work remotely as a business, particularly during COVID, and has saved us time, printing costs and many sheets of paper.”

Mid Market Customer of the Year: Colin Biggers & Paisley

This award recognised the customer who used DocuSign security features to retool business processes for more compliant, trusted operations. Conveyancing practice Colin Biggers & Paisley did all this, and more.

Prior to DocuSign, Colin Biggers & Paisley was saddled with a highly paper-driven process, with huge expenses around printers, couriers and office services staff, not to mention manual updates to clients on the status of each apartment or land sale. In 2015, the company trialled DocuSign, and very quickly saw its potential to transform the entire process. By 2016, Colin Biggers & Paisley had pioneered a market leading solution for the legal property market called CBP Exchange.

CBP Exchange uses DocuSign eSignature to remove the expense of producing and managing paper contracts. In fact, the cost of operating their property exchange has fallen by 70%. Other benefits include real-time reporting to clients, the ability to serve clients from anywhere via a digital platform, improved quality of data collection, and process standardisation across the board.  

As well as all those business benefits, Colin Biggers & Paisley estimates huge environmental benefits – saving 460,000 kg of timber, 11.3 million litres of water, 1.1 million kg of carbon, and 75,000 kg of waste.

SMB Customer of the Year: Biz Solutions

This award recognised the customer whose DocuSign implementation had an outsized impact on the efficiency of their small- or medium-sized business. For our winner, Biz Solutions, DocuSign means more time for Wordle … oh, and growth.

Biz Solutions used to go through more than 100 reams of paper per month. Today, they need less than five reams, and they’re delivering a much faster, easier experience to thousands of accounting clients. From tax returns to minutes and resolutions, Biz Solutions’ clients can now sign documents from anywhere, on any device. 

Daniel Soeteman, Senior Manager, Biz Solutions, was clear on the benefits that DocuSign delivers. “Our clients love our streamlined process with DocuSign – it is intuitive, professional and beautiful. We chose DocuSign as our preferred partner, not only because of their amazing reputation and support but for its simplicity and ease of use,” he said.

And for his internal team? “How good are the status updates! We can see who has viewed, who has signed and who, ‘tsk tsk’, still needs to sign. We send a document, complete a ‘Wordle’ and voila, the document is back in our hands! Turn around from sending something to closing off a job has virtually reduced to within the hour – not days, not weeks.” 

Emerging Small Business: McSweeney CA

This award honoured the customer whose DocuSign implementation had a significant impact on the environment, as well as their business. Our winner, McSweeney CA, has gone completely paperless – a huge win on both counts.

Prior to using DocuSign, the accounting practice was heavily reliant on paper, churning through around 380 reams per year. Since making the switch, the business has saved 633 million kg of wood, 1.5 billion kg of carbon, 103 million kg of waste, and 15.5 billion litres of water.

As well as the environmental savings, the team is reaping the benefits of a streamlined, efficient and reliable process, which has revolutionised the way they do business with clients.

DocuSign Champion: Timothy Roberts, Commonwealth Bank of Australia

This award recognised an individual who demonstrated outstanding leadership in the rollout and adoption of DocuSign eSignature. Our extremely worthy winner of this inaugural award is Timothy Roberts, Executive Manager Digitisation, Commercial Lending at CBA.

Tim was asked to lead the deployment of DocuSign for all Commercial Loans as an emergency response to COVID in August 2021. He coordinated a complex team of technical, risk, legal, operational and distribution experts to deliver the solution in a matter of weeks.

Roll-out of eSignatures wasn’t easy. In some states, wet ink signatures were still required by law on deeds and mortgages. And, while temporary legislation was put in place during COVID to help get documents signed in the absence of face-to-face meetings, many commercial deals still needed a pen-to-paper signature.

Tim has been instrumental in advocating for change in the industry. He was a key contributor to an ABA submission to the joint Commonwealth and State Government Modernising Document Execution review; and he led the introduction of a DocuSign ‘print, sign and post’ process – which allows documents to be delivered by DocuSign with instructions to print just the documents requiring wet ink signature and posting them back to the bank. This opened up the scope of deals and allowed national expansion and a push to use DocuSign in all instances.

And, to help drive adoption, Tim and his team worked closely with frontline and operations teams to deliver a superior customer experience with DocuSign – providing pro-active support, enhancing the process, automating tasks, simplifying documents and obsessively focusing on continuous improvement.

Now, CBA leads the industry in the use of eSignatures for commercial loans, with adoption above 90% for all loans across all segments nationally. DocuSign deals are, on average, 20 days faster than paper deals, and CBA Commercial Lending has grown at 12.5% over the past 12 months.

DocuSign Innovation Award: Westpac New Zealand

This award recognised the company using DocuSign in unique and innovative ways to achieve greater efficiency, deliver better customer and employee experiences, or build security and trust – and it goes to the Paperless Home Loans Squad at Westpac NZ.

Westpac NZ is the first partner in Australasia to implement DocuSign CLM as the key document template tool for all consumer lending agreements. The implementation – which was achieved at lightning speed to meet tight CCFA regulatory deadlines – has transformed both the employee and customer experience. 

For employees, documents are signed and returned correctly, saving on follow-up; while for customers, the documents are easy to read, sign and send back. Now, Westpac has its sights set on further use cases for DocuSign, not just in NZ but in Australia too. 

Are you inspired to do more with DocuSign? 

As the award winners above have demonstrated, big things are possible with DocuSign. Whether you’re an existing DocuSign user who wants to do more with our platform, or you’re keen to give it a first try, get in touch with our team today to talk next steps. We’re here to help.