Speeding up Business: Turning Manual Processes into Digital Transactions

In today’s world, we expect to work, shop, search, communicate, and pretty much do everything instantly and across a host of devices. All this impacts the ever-important customer experience factor that makes or breaks companies—which means that speed is critical for success. I’m not just talking about the customer-facing side of the coin, either. Employees are internal consumers, and they have similar expectations about their work experience. If your company can meet those expectations across departments, streamlining processes and reducing the time and red tape it takes to complete tasks, you’ll reap big rewards. How do I know? We’ve saved time and money by incorporating Adobe Sign’s robust digital signature technology into our workflow. Here’s how you can do that, too.

The Value of Digital Signatures

A recent study found that if a website takes longer than three seconds to load, 53 percent of users will say, ‘forget it,’ and leave. Three seconds! If we’re that impatient when it comes to our online activity, how maddening must it be to print a file, sign it, scan it, and send it—a process that can take days if papers get lost in the shuffle (literally). Aside from the user’s perspective, consider also the business angle: How much do companies lose in time and resources waiting on parties to complete manual tasks? That’s basically the opposite of business agility—a factor that, according to my colleague Daniel Newman, is the key to successfully moving through digital transformation. Hard to ignore.

Those aren’t hypothetical questions. As I’ve written in the past, adopting e-signatures has changed everything for our business. As always, to see the real impact here in terms of time-saved, let’s take a look at additional data as we examine the real-world benefits of Adobe Sign, Adobe’s workflow-boosting solution that goes far beyond the collection of e-signatures.

Real-World Benefits of Adobe Sign

Before I dive straight into the numbers, understand there’s more to digital signature solutions than the signatures themselves. On Adobe Sign you can  prepare a document for signature (from a template or using your own) and send it to multiple parties (if warranted). The recipient(s) can then sign with a few clicks—in a way that is both legally binding, secure, trackable, and automatically archived. Oh, and another important thing—all that can happen on any device.

Bonuses: If you have a paper document and a mobile device with a camera, you can scan the file and send it for signature, too. In addition, Adobe Sign is also easily integrated with a number of apps—some you likely already use, like Dropbox and Salesforce, and even those you’ve customized for your business. (For more information on Adobe Sign, click here or read this whitepaper.)

Bottom line: Hunting down emails for the date you sent a contract? Trying to follow a paper trail that may or may not have gotten recorded? Calling clients and employees to remind them to sign and return critical documents so you can move your workflow forward? In our digital world, those situations constitute signature quicksand and leave your business stuck when it could be moving onto the next conversion or innovation. My business, like many others, has chosen to leverage Adobe Sign and bridge that productivity gap.

We’re far from alone. Do you know the saying, “time is money?” Here are additional real-world examples of how businesses have saved both by choosing Adobe Sign as their digital signature solution:

• Before adopting Adobe Sign, application signatures at Diners Club International took several days to acquire and move through the sales completion process—a bummer for call center representatives trying to work in-the-moment. After Adobe Sign, though, that same turnaround time was reduced to just 17.3 minutes. The result? An easier application process means a better customer experience, higher application completion rates, quicker scheduling and processing, and, ultimately, higher customer retention. All that adds up to better business. (Read the full case study here.)
• Telephonica’s business model is rooted in digital and mobile tech, so their move to Adobe Sign was a no-brainer. When they made the switch from paper forms, they found their contract signing timeline went from three weeks (yes, weeks), to 11 hours, and their onboarding time shrunk from nine days to just over one day. The key? Those significant improvements didn’t take years to surface; those results are a mere four months post-implementation. (Read the full case study here.)

 What’s Next?

For us, what was once the hurry-up-and-wait game of collecting signatures is now an efficient, organized, fast, and secure digital process—and we couldn’t be happier.

Haven’t made the switch to digital signatures just yet? If you’re talking boosting your digital transformation efforts in 2018 (and who isn’t?), this is one tech solution that needs to be not only on your radar, but in your budget.

Additional Resources on This Topic:

Focused on Customer Experience? Start with Your Documents
The Silent Culprit that Kills “Done” Deals

This post is written in partnership with Adobe Document Cloud as part of a sponsored series. The thoughts and opinions here are my own.

This article was first published on V3Broadsuite.