How do customers benefit from Electronic Signature

One of the main goals of DocuSign is to bring our customers success. Many of our customers are currently experiencing the benefits of using DocuSign eSignature. In this article, we look at the benefits of implementing electronic signature in several organisations and share stories from our customers on the successes they have achieved by using DocuSign eSignature. 

Better Onboarding and Faster Sales Cycles with Electronic Signature

The bottom line is that implementing electronic signature makes it easier for customers to do business with you. Many of DocuSign’s customers are streamlining their customer onboarding process, closing deals faster and improving their customer's experiences along the way. 

Some of the workflows within financial services are very long and include lots of manual paperwork. Santander UK’s SME, Commercial and Corporate Banking teams offer financial services products to businesses with a turnover of between £500,000 and £500 million, but two of the biggest frustrations for business customers in securing loans included the previous onboarding process and the time it took to get cash. With the DocuSign Agreement Cloud, Santander has drastically reduced the time it takes for new customers to open an account and access funds. They can now do so digitally, without the need to go to a branch or send paperwork. This unnecessarily manual process took customers an average of 12 (and sometimes up to 25) days to complete. With help from the DocuSign Customer Success team, Santander implemented DocuSign eSignature and designed an advanced signing workflow that allows multiple people to collaborate on and sign the same document simultaneously. Since many businesses have multiple signatories in various locations and others who may just fill forms out prior to signature, this radically improved a slow, linear process. It now takes an average of just two days for customers to open an account. Jonathan Holman, Head of Digital Transformation, Santander Corporate & Commercial, says, “If we remove 30 percent of the time required to negotiate and execute a loan—through automation, parallel processing and eSignature—that time gets channelled back into customer relationships.” 

Travel company Kayak has also improved their contract turnaround times by 98% using DocuSign eSignature. Kayak revolutionised the travel industry when it launched in 2004 by offering a metasearch engine for travel purchases before any other travel site. Their business model does, though, rely on selling lots of advertising. This formerly entailed an intricate advertising contract process with manual paperwork. Kayak Sales Representatives had to first create contracts in Salesforce in PDF form to send via email to clients. Clients then printed, signed, scanned, and emailed documents back to Kayak, where the sales teams had to obtain required internal signatures using the same manual methods. The process culminated in a final round of scanning and emailing documents back to clients. Tony Leung, Director of System Administration for Kayak, says, “It was very painful, the process took up to two weeks and was very error-prone.” Those same tasks are straightforward nowadays due to DocuSign’s support for advanced workflows and the implementation of DocuSign eSignature. Signed contracts are now automatically filed into Salesforce, which has reduced billing errors and eased concerns about potential legal issues. Leung says, “Introducing DocuSign helped every aspect of our business—efficiency, compliance, measuring, tracking—everything. We definitely have gotten and continue to get ROI from DocuSign every day.”

Better Employee Experiences and Efficient Recruitment

Many organisations want to manage the employee lifecycle to provide better employee experiences seamlessly. Salesforce now recruits new employees across five continents to fuel its global growth. Timing is everything, and even the smallest details matter in the fiercely competitive technology industry. “Even several years ago, people expected to be able to sign on their phones and be able to turn things around quickly,” says Summer Ford, Salesforce’s senior director of recruitment operations. It’s important to keep pace with changing candidate expectations and the competition. Implementing eSignature meant ditching manual paperwork and implementing digital agreements that integrate with the company’s existing HR platforms. When Salesforce adopted Workday in 2018, the company used DocuSign’s pre-built Workday integration to connect with its new HCM system. Offering candidates a role used to depend on whether an executive was physically in the office to wet sign contracts and offer letters, but with the seamless integration between DocuSign and Workday, Salesforce’s recruitment team can complete the recruiting process digitally. Last year, the team prepared agreements for about 7,000 new hires.  Recruiters enter offer details into Workday, which are then automatically pulled into DocuSign eSignature. Once the offer letter is signed, any data collected from the employee is updated in Workday along with the completed offer letter. The average time needed to complete an offer letter is now just one day which is an 80% reduction from the former process. 

Aon is a leading global professional services firm providing a broad range of risk, retirement and health solutions that has also improved employee experience with DocuSign eSignature. The company has 50,000 colleagues in 120 countries and decided to use DocuSign eSignature to replace its outdated, manual agreements processes. Richard Bullock, global product manager at Aon, heads up the company’s global DocuSign initiative. He says, “DocuSign eSignature provides capabilities and functionality that support legally defensible contracts throughout the European Union, Latin America, Asia Pacific and other countries where Aon operates.” Matt Ollar, Aon’s HR Global Operations Coordinator, based in Poland, says, “Ultimately, DocuSign helps get colleagues’ compensation change letters quicker, get positions filled quicker, and ensure that there are the proper alerts triggered for documents taking longer to process than they should.”

Reducing risk

Womble Bond Dickinson (WBD) is a full-service transatlantic law firm that has over 120 partners and around 450 lawyers in eight offices across the UK as well as 540 lawyers working in 19 offices in the US. The innovative firm is in the UK's top 20 law firms. Since pioneering the adoption of electronic signature, the firm now has 66% of contracts signed in under an hour and 88% in 24 hours. The firm recognised that traditional ‘wet ink’ signatures and virtual signings via email were outdated and causing numerous inefficiencies, so they implemented electronic signatures and are seeing impressive results.. DocuSign has helped drive a welcome move away from paper towards more efficient digital working practices and processes. Lockdown highlighted to the Real Estate team the need to transform its signing process. They relied wholly on paper with documents emailed out, then printed and physically signed by multiple people across the UK and abroad and returned via post or courier once the signatures were gathered. This often made it impossible to know when the agreement would reappear. Following the Law Commission's report on electronic signatures in September 2019 and the HM Land Registry’s acceptance of electronic signatures in conveyancing in July 2020, the Real Estate team could finally execute documents using eSignature. Speeding up the final signing stage of a transaction has been critical in the uncertain business environment created by COVID-19. Electronic signatures reduce contract turnaround times, improve the customer experience, and increase efficiency. It used to take a minimum of 2 days to obtain “wet ink” signatures and sometimes up to a week. 

Reducing paper waste and freeing up resources

Many organisations want to move to electronic signatures so that they can go paperless. For example, moving to paperless signatures helped Maersk save 1.8 million sheets of paper in 2021. Every six minutes, a Maersk container ship calls on a port somewhere around the globe. The Danish shipping giant handles one in five containers shipped by sea and transports goods for some of the world’s biggest brands. Implementing DocuSign eSignature has allowed Maersk to free up resources to focus on supplier relationships and sustainability goals. “Our mission is about freeing up people to focus more time on value-added things like supplier relationships and environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals,” said Nikolaj Jessen-Klixbüll, head of procurement delivery. Other organisations like law firm Womble Bond Dickinson have been impressed by the significant environmental savings e-signature has brought them. So far, they have conserved 59,209 litres of water and 2,410 kilos of wood, averting 5,656 kilogrammes of CO2 emissions and eliminating 392 kilogrammes of waste. Katherine Crowley, Real Estate Practice Development Manager for Womble Bond Dickinson (UK), says WBD is mindful of its impact on the environment. She says, “WBD is continually looking to  improve on environmental performance, and DocuSign helps us cut our waste as well as saving on time and costs.”

If you’ve enjoyed hearing about the benefits of using DocuSign, you may like to read more of our customer stories.