electronic signatures

Nov

2021

Best Way to Digitally Sign a PDF

The ever-changing technology has advanced in such a way that nobody could have predicted. Look around, and you’d see that it has digitized pretty much everything. In this technology-driven era, you don’t have to waste your precious time doing simple tasks, such as signing documents and contracts. Those days are long past when signature meant manually signing a paper using a pen. Today, we aim to tell you the best way to digitally sign a pdf.

What is an Electronic Signature?

Electronic signatures have been on a roll since their inception. Electronic signatures refer to signing a document or a contract online. In simple words, it’s the digital form of your wet signature. An electronic signature serves the same purpose as the wet-signature, i.e., and signifies your consent on an online document.

Considering the fact that millions of professionals all over the world sign documents every day, electronic signatures hit the nail on the head. They have been around for quite some time now and for good reasons. Not only do they save an awful lot of your time, but they are convenient as well.

If you own a business organization and spend too much time signing documents every day, then consider switching to electronic signatures. You’ll certainly end up saving a great deal of your time, which you can invest in doing something productive. The best part about electronic signatures is that they have the same legal weight as wet signatures. Almost all the business organizations all over the world have started accepting these signatures. An absolute win-win for you!

How to do Electronic Signatures on PDF?

There are times when you have to sign a document on your phone, and there’s no way around it. Imagine you got an email, and you have to sign and send it back. One method that you may be aware of is to print it out to get a hard copy, sign it using a pen, then scan it and email it back. This may work for you if you don’t have to send it back instantly. However, if you’ve been asked to sign and send it back immediately, we can only send you sympathies. And it goes without saying that professionals cannot afford to waste this much time day-in, day-out.

Now you might be wondering if there is any way to virtually sign a pdf, and if possible, how to sign a pdf file? Well, there are plenty of options when it comes to signing documents and contracts online; none is better than Lunarpen.com. You can sign the document in all popular formats, let alone pdf. Let’s discuss what’s so special about Lunarpen.com.

What sets Lunarpen.com apart from the rest?

The main reason why Lunarpen.com is the go-to choice for professionals is that it brings all its expertise and highly advanced features to the table and ensures your documents’ safety with great efficiency. While signing the document, a private code is sent to both parties to verify their identity, and a time-stamped proof file is generated to protect your document. Furthermore, you can rest assured knowing that all the collected signatures by Lunarpen.com fully comply with the regulations and are as legally binding as the wet signatures.

At Lunarpen.com, sending and signing a document is an absolute cinch. The interface has been designed meticulously for your maximum convenience. You can upload the file from your desktop, Dropbox, and google drive, and then sending it to multiple parties is just a click away. Moreover, you can track the document to see its progress, which means that you can see who has signed and who is yet to sign.

What’s even better? Lunarpen.com is compatible with all widely used storage solutions, such as Dropbox, OneDrive, Box, and many more. It also allows you to sign the documents right from Gmail, Google Docs, Google Drive, and the Chrome browser. And yes, did we forget to mention that you can access Lunarpen.com from all the devices, including mobile phones, laptops, and MacBooks. All you need is an internet connection, and you’re ready to go! Sign up for a free account now and take your signing up a notch.

How to create a signature at Lunarpen.com?

As we mentioned earlier, Lunarpen.com is all about your convenience. You get multiple options when it comes to creating your electronic signatures. You can either draw, type, or upload an image of your signatures to store them. Apart from that, there are plenty of professional templates of non-disclosure contracts, invoices, and other documents that you can send ready right off the bat. The cherry on the cake here is that you can share these templates with your colleagues as well. What else to ask for?

Final Thoughts

Electronic signatures have quickly replaced wet signatures, thanks to the convenience they offer. Lunarpen.com is a feature-packed yet easy-to-use solution that offers the fastest electronic signature experience. There are tons of features that ensure your document’s safety. Sign up for a free account now and get a digitally signed document in no time!

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I digitally sign a PDF on my phone?

When it comes to signing a PDF electronically on your phone, we recommend using Lunarpen.com. It offers the best signing experience, and your documents’ safety is guaranteed. Everything is incredibly simple and convenient as you can draw, upload, or type your signatures. Sign up for free to get the best signing experience.

Can we sign a PDF document?

Yes, you can digitally sign a PDF document. There are many apps that enable you to sign a pdf document, but Lunarpen.com is the most convenient and efficient one. Whether it’s a laptop or your mobile phone, you can sign a pdf through Lunarpen.com. It’s packed with groundbreaking features to ensure your documents’ safety.

Nov

2021

Type of Signatures

It’s no secret that professionals all over the world sign various documents daily. Whether it’s a notice board in your school or a file in your office, signatures are quite ubiquitous. There was a time when signatures meant doing signatures using pen and paper. If you’re wondering what the different types of signatures for your name are, you’d be surprised to know that there are plenty of ways to sign a document.

In this article, we aim to discuss every popular type of signature. Apart from that, we’d also guide you on which signature you should use and why. Let’s delve further!

Wet Signature

Wet signature is the traditional type of signature. When you use a pen to manually sign a paper or document, it is called a wet signature. Like other kinds of signatures, the main purpose of wet signatures is to indicate that the signatory has read, understood, and agreed to the contents of that document.

It’s said that wet signatures were first practised in 1677 when a law was passed in the UK, which states that every contract should be written and signed in order to have legal standing.

Since then, every contract was signed manually until the invention of electronic signatures.

Considering the fact that a wet signature could be forged, it’s a good rule of thumb to do a wet signature in the presence of at least two or three people that you trust. A wet signature could be your nickname, real name (first or second name), your company’s name, or even a symbol or mark.

Electronic Signature

An electronic signature, also known as e-signature, is another widely used type of signature. It has gained so much popularity lately and organizations across the globe have switched to it. It’s an online version of your wet signatures. In other words, it’s an illustration of your wet signatures in digital form. A scanned picture of a signatory’s wet signatures or a bio-metric signing on signing hardware are a few electronic signatures examples.

As technology grows, signing documents has become more convenient. Gone are the days when you had to spend a great deal of your time signing the documents manually. The most obvious benefit of electronic signatures is that they save your time and money. The thing with the wet signature is that you have to buy pen and ink week in, week out, or you’d be caught short. Thankfully, that’s not the case with electronic signatures.

In the light of the differences described by the EIDAS regulations (Electronic Identification, Authentication, and Trust Services regulations) in 2016, let’s discuss the types of electronic signatures briefly:

Simple Electronic Signature: In simple electronic signatures, you don’t have to go through any hassle of verifying your identity. Predictably then, they are not as secure as the other types of electronic signatures. You can go for these signatures, but it’s recommended not to trust them in case of sensitive documents as they are more vulnerable to fraudulent activities.
Advanced Electronic Signature: Next, we have the advanced electronic signature. In this type, you have to provide some verification of your identity. Generally, the signatory is verified by certificates, which are often delivered via a delivery service. They are safer than simple electronic signatures, as they require verification.

Digital Signature

A digital signature, also known as the qualified electronic signature, is the most secure type of electronic signatures. They take the verification a step further to comply with the eIDAS regulations. All the details about the signatory are saved in these signatures. If you want your signing process to be the safest, then you can’t go wrong with the digital signatures, plain and simple!

Our Verdict

There are times when wet signatures or electronic signatures are the only options. But if the choice is yours, we recommend using electronic signatures.

If you own a company and rely on wet signatures only, you are very likely to lag behind, as signing documents manually consumes a lot of time. Switching to electronic signatures will save time for you that you can invest in doing something productive. And yes, unlike wet signatures, electronic signatures can hardly be forged. This is why most organizations have replaced wet signatures with electronic signatures already.

Formats

Talking about e signature format, electronic signatures nowadays are compatible with pretty much every file format. Although PDF is the most widely used one, you can sign documents of other formats as well. The same goes for the digital signature formats. You can also save your wet signatures in PDF format. Many software such as Adobe Acrobat, Autograph signature app, are available that allow you to save your wet signatures.

Lunarpen- A Name of Trust

There are dozens of websites and software that offer electronic signatures, none better than the Lunarpen. It’s a company that offers the safest and seamless signing experience. Individuals and companies all over the world use Lunarpen to sign documents every day - and for good reasons. This entire procedure is quite meticulous for users’ convenience. A major part of the reason why it has won the trust of professionals is that it’s safe and easy. The signing process requires the signatory to confirm his identity via a private code.

The collected signatures at Lunarpen are in compliance with all the regulations.

From One-drive to Dropbox, you can connect your account to many applications. Apart from that, it comes with a highly advanced feature that helps you track the document and see the progress. Sign up now for a free account on Lunarpen and take your signing up a notch.

Final Thoughts

Wet signatures and electronic signatures are the two main types of signatures. While the wet signature is the traditional type of signature, an electronic signature is its digital form.

Organizations can save a great deal of their time by switching to electronic signatures.

Lunarpen is a well-known company that offers electronic signatures. Tons of innovative features at Lunarpen make the signing process an absolute breeze.

Oct

2021

How can the Tourism Industry use Electronic Signatures?

The tourism industry is the world’s largest employer with more than 260 million employees and has more than 1.2 billion travellers taking trips outside their own country. This sector contributes a huge part of the world’s GDP and is one of the fastest-growing lucrative industries.

The industry has its fair share of problems with lots of challenges like last-minute cancellations, surprise accommodation requests to people not showing up at all, along with a lot of paperwork for admission requests and guest records.

There is a great way to deal with these challenges with electronic signatures, which are now a common thing that is rapidly being incorporated in the tourism industry. In this business, you can use electronic signatures to make your life easier and your company more efficient.

Why electronic signature is the solution to Tourism industry woes?

The present form of tourism industry has several shortcomings in the way it works. It suffers from paper-based processes, which are time-consuming and can be error-prone too. Electronic signature solves all these issues by providing secure and instant digital transactions that do not need any paper for further processing or storing.

With a digital signature, you can:

Protect the integrity of your records from manipulation and tampering
Do away with all the paperwork that has been used for centuries
Create a seamless process - be it your travel bookings, hotel check-ins or even bill payments - just by pressing a button!

Once you have this excellent solution in place, it will benefit you and make life easier for millions of tourists across the globe.

How do electronic signatures simplify the guest check-in experience?

It is crucial to assist guests in spending less time on paperwork and enjoying services in the tourism industry. Electronic Signature apps help the sector in the following ways:

Guest check-in and checkout processes are accelerated as the guests can register themselves in just a few seconds and receive personalized itineraries for their entire stay.
Substitutes precise, appealing digital forms for paper forms shown on eSignature enabled devices to reduce errors and improve customer experience.
Retains the reassuringly familiar sign-in experience that many guests appreciate without depending on the inefficient and wasteful use of paper.
Allows fast cross- and up-selling by displaying new services and special offers on colour screens while not in signing mode.
It helps the guest avoid the hassle of carrying bulky pen and paper as they can sign their name digitally, which is then stored in the database for access at any time.

How the electronic signatures help the tourism industry?

Streamlines back-end activities & paperwork at the front desk through digitalization, reducing the hassles of storing paper documents.
Creates a good first impression on the customers by differentiating the premium experience and convenience in a competitive market.
It saves significant time on paperwork allowing your guests to enjoy a better experience by capturing details of your guest like identity, preferences & more.
The innovative technology provides a cost-effective solution to fraud, forgery or alteration of documents and signatures in the tourism industry.

Tourism Industry documents that can be signed using eSignature

Booking confirmations
Hotel check-ins & checkouts
Commercial hotel bookings
Expense reports
Audit reports
Time & attendance records
Travel policy
Consent forms
Employment contracts
Data entry
Cash settlements
Employee instructions

Tours & Travels Case Study

About the company

H&S Travels and Tours began operations in 2004. From humble beginnings, they’ve grown to deal with over 200 airlines worldwide, assisting customers in getting affordable aircraft tickets without any hassles or confusion. Additionally, they have a global presence, with offices in the United States, Canada, South Africa, and India.

Challenge

H&S Travels processes paperwork for passengers and tourists worldwide, with the majority based in the United States.Before implementing eSignatures, travellers were required to print, scan, and email the documentation to H&S Travels, which was confirmed only after receiving the countersigned documents on email. Turnaround times were slow, and it wasn’t easy to track which traveller had signed and who had not.

Rather than tracking hundreds of separate contracts scattered across email inboxes, H&S Travels determined it was time to build a centralized hub for all the document signing needs.

Solution

These were the benefits enjoyed by H&S Travels after the implementation of eSignature solutions:

Significantly reduces turnaround times

H&S received positive feedback from their clients, who report that the signing process is now easier than ever as they received signed contracts back in as little as five to ten minutes.

A simple way to track the progress

The H&S eSignature dashboard enables them to see who has signed and who has not signed their documents. All data is easily understood and accessible in a single, convenient place.

Templates that save time

The company uses the functionality of the templates to load customer contracts rather than creating a new document each time. They save their agreement to the software, make minor adjustments for each new customer, and then send it off.

Hotels Case Study

About the company

Hotel 1926 is operated by Roosendaal Hotels, a modest hospitality firm with three facilities on the Mediterranean island, governed by Bortex group holdings. Following a big makeover a few years ago, Hotel 1926 now has a unique focus on eco-friendliness and sustainability woven into their entire business model.

Challenge

Throughout its year-long hiatus, the hotel was completely renovated with an emphasis on modernity & sustainability. It took significant efforts for being environmentally friendly: paperless brochures, hotel information printouts, tablets in every room, and PIN admission for guest rooms rather than plastic key cards.

Before exploring eSignatures, Hotel 1926 signed most contractor agreements & corporate partnership agreements during in-person meetings. The hotel employed local contractors to assist them in managing other properties on the island. Inviting them in was another cumbersome step that hampered the process.

However, delays frequently happen when parties desire additional time to analyze a contract before signing on the spot. As they were already going paperless by digitizing brochures and other assets, it seemed sensible to do the same with the physical documents of hotels 1926.

Solution

Streamlined workflows for signing

Rather than requiring partners, contractors, and guests to sign documents immediately upon receipt, Hotel 1926 staff can notify the signees. This way, nobody feels rushed or pressured. Their signature is requested over email, which allows them ample time to review the documents. Once they’re finished, they can quickly sign and return it.

Enhancements to customer service

Hotel 1926 appreciated the ability to get digital signatures on credit card authorization documents. It is far more convenient to offer a digital signature than to print the document, sign it, and email a scanned copy. It is incredibly suitable for those who do not have access to a printer at home.

Templates that save time

Before implementing electronic signatures, Hotel 1926 painstakingly changed the company’s name whenever they drafted a new contract or agreement, then spent time manually entering dates, terms, and other information. They breezed through this phase with templates, as all their standard fields are recorded in the appropriate locations.

Conclusion

The tourism industry has tremendous potential to grow in the future, but it is difficult to achieve it without the help of technology. The main concern of travellers is to have a hassle-free travel experience. They want the complete travel management to be done online. That is why the tourism industry is moving towards digitization. Digital signatures have made it easier for travellers to plan their trips with ease.

Register free to use the eSignature application and learn more about how electronic signatures can help the tourism industry reach new heights.

Aug

2021

How Electronic Signatures Support Work From Home in 2021?

Are you working from home and trying to be as productive as in the office?

Worldwide businesses are working remotely to battle the pandemic and stay afloat in the market. So, how to maintain productivity and ensure your critical business processes keep going smoothly?

Some fantastic tools in the market are designed especially for remote working professionals. Electronic signatures are essential tools to help you work without hiccups in a home or remote environment far away from the office.

Integrating electronic signatures in Work From Home (WFH) environment:

Integrating electronic signatures in-home is as easy as using a simple app on a smartphone or laptop. The technology helps both the sender and the signer work from home efficiently by following these steps:

Sign up for a free eSignature account from your device
Create or upload the signing document using ready to use templates or Google drive
Use the signed document sharing feature to share it with a closed group of people
Use the LunarPen interface (draw, write or upload your signature) to eSign the document
Quickly receive the electronically signed documents on your email

Industries that need electronic signatures for Working From Home (WFH)

Legal Industry: Lawyers can notarize documents remotely

Insurance Industry: Quickly process insurance claims without delay

Banking Industry: Use it for eKYC, opening accounts & loan approvals

Real Estate Industry: Sign property contracts & agreements on time

Healthcare Industry: Effectively manage documents for patients, vendors, physicians & employees

Construction Industry: Save time & store project documents managed by engineers and contractors

We have seen how easy it is to integrate the eSignature tool in a home environment, and almost all industries need this essential tool for their remote working employees.

The ability to work from home or in any location is a reality in 2021. Organizations have realized the value of flexible workforce arrangements, and employees are demanding it.

With the help of electronic signatures, people are able to do their work wherever they want without coming back to the office. There are several reasons why electronic signatures are an essential work from home tool to have on hand :

1) Suitable for remote working employees

Research says that by 2025, 70% of the professional workforce will be working remotely at least five days a month. Another survey reveals that over 74% of companies plan to permanently shift employees to remote work after the COVID-19 pandemic ends.

It isn’t easy to synchronize work when your employees are sitting at different locations. You can’t get in touch with another employee instantly if you need their signatures on the documents. Distances become huge barriers in such situations, deeply affecting everyday business.

Electronic signature technology helps overcome all the critical business barriers for remote working employees. Your employees can create physical documents using readymade templates and sign them from their home locations without getting into physical contact with each other.

This way, electronic signatures maintain social distancing norms eliminating the need to print, sign, and scan physical documents, thereby making them the perfect solution for remote working employees.

2) Save infrastructure costs and utility costs

According to the WSP report, companies utilize the pandemic situation as an opportunity to downsize, reduce operating costs and invest more in technology.

With nearly all the middle and senior-level employees working from home, and office buildings closed for years, to abide by the lockdown guidelines, Who needs an office now and pay for rental costs unnecessarily?

Work From Home (WFH) helps companies save mammoth infrastructure costs in the form of corporate office rentals as well as utility costs (running charges of electricity, power backup, internet, canteen, water, security, and maintenance)

Digital signatures are a match made in heaven for corporate companies that need to reduce their operating costs significantly.

You do not need to depend on office variables like printers, scanners, copiers, fax machines, electricity, and colossal office space to function.

The technology is easily integrable with the company’s existing processes and lets you function independently from any geographic location without inflating the company bills. Anyone can operate the eSignature application on portable devices like laptops and smartphones, actively used by professionals working from home.

3) Helps process transactions & agreements away from the office environment

Electronic signatures present a welcome solution to one of the biggest challenges of working from home- having access to processing transactions and agreements away from the office environment. It includes regular processes like:

Employment contracts
Customer contracts
Supplier agreements
Purchase orders
Work orders
Mergers, acquisitions & disposals

The main reason why a small yet powerful application like electronic signature can do transactions away from the office environment successfully is due to

Readymade templates: Availability of readymade templates for preparing online documents (You don’t need office hardware like desktop and printers to prepare physical documents)

Cloud storage integrations: You must be worrying that if employees are signing documents from home. How can they store the signed documents in a safer place?

eSignatures utilize cloud storage to store the signed documents in digital format, removing the need for physical storage.

Reminders & notifications: As there are delays in signing the documents due to several rounds of follow-ups with respective employees and the clients. Electronic signature solutions with inbuilt mechanisms for reminders and notifications help them sign documents in no time.

4) Safe and secure for sending confidential data to remote workers

The companies are regularly sending sensitive and confidential documents to their remote working employees during the corona pandemic.

There are many roadblocks between a company and a remote worker to send company data securely, which may be an unsecured WIFI connection responsible for spreading viruses and malware that can compromise the organization’s data security.

It’s not the case that the company can’t use the official email for sending highly secretive documents to its employees.

There is a strong reason not to send confidential information in an email when your employees are off the company network!

When you send an email, the message leaves your email provider’s server and travels all over the internet. The vulnerability of email is why you should not use this channel as a medium to exchange sensitive information.

You can use an electronic signature as a trusted application to send confidential data to remote working employees at any distant location. The technology is completely safe and allows a view, edit, and create access for the documents only to the selected employees that can exchange information between themselves safely.

5) Boost remote work productivity

These are some unique ways by which companies can use an electronic signature to work from home:

Make remote hiring of employees super easy

LunarPen eSignature solutions help HR professionals do

Employee induction
Employee onboarding
Accelerating employee agreement process
Automating employee agreement process
Prepare performance appraisal documents

HR professionals need not have face-to-face contact with employees to get their documents signed. They can complete employee onboarding in a few clicks using eSignature application from any authorized device.

Sales professionals can seal a deal in minutes.

You want to get an important document signed by your client. But both of you are working from home. So, how to get the signatures if you have travel restrictions in your region.

Nothing to worry about!

Electronic signatures are at your service. You do not have to travel & meet the clients physically. Your client needs to install and access the LunarPen eSignature application on their secure portable device and eSign the documents in easy steps without further delay.

Conclusion

If your company has shifted to remote operations and is trying to boost the productivity of professionals working from home, join hands with LunarPen eSignature applications as a trusted partner to drive your business. Sign up for a free e Signature account now.

Aug

2021

How Telecom Industry benefits from Electronic Signatures?

The powerful presence of the telecom industry is responsible for boosting communication, workplace flexibility, and the worldwide market reach of every small & big company.

Telecom services have proven vital in the COVID-19 epidemic by providing video conferencing, mobile communication, and high-speed internet services. It is a huge comfort for companies trying to stay afloat in one of the toughest business environments.

Thousands of vendors partner with telecom operators to ensure service quality and continuity. The paperwork for service contracts, partnerships, and agreements takes up most of the vendors and the network solution providers.

When you have uncountable applications related to new service requests, agreements, and contracts, paper-based processes become time-consuming, costly, and increase customer dissatisfaction.

Customers get impatient if their requested services get delayed. In addition, failing to meet service quality standards increases the rate of customer churn.

Electronic signatures can help firms improve internal business processes and provide exceptional customer service.

Here is how the telecom industry can benefit from electronic signatures:

1) Improve customer experience

In the highly competitive telecom industry, customer experience is a critical factor in maintaining a competitive advantage. After the automobile and hotel industry, the telecom sector has the third-highest potential for increasing revenue by improving customer experience (CX). According to Forrester’s research’s CX index scoring system, telcos that increase CX scores by one point generate an additional USD 3.39 revenue in per-customer incremental revenue.

Another research by HBR states that customers with the most satisfying experiences spend an average of 140% more than those that have experienced a shortfall in customer experience.

Electronic signatures improve customer experience in telecom industry by

Limiting time taking paperwork
Blazing fast customer onboarding
Enabling self service for faster response
Eliminating waiting time to access telecom services
Accelerated closing of vendor contracts

2) Acquire customers in record time

Guess about a single industry accepting new connection requests from uncountable customers every day.

You guessed it right! It’s the telecom industry that gets prepaid, postpaid and broadband connection applications from trillions of customers around the globe.

Order fulfillment at the right time is the biggest roadblock in new customer acquisition as the customer service team of every company has to accept, process & verify tons of physical documents for every service request.

Every online document in the electronic signature application can be signed, stored, and verified on the same day. It assures speedy acquisition of new customers compared to the competition, which is not using electronic signature technology.

3) Sign all documents related to telecom business processes

The telecom business processes require a massive amount of paper due to handling a high volume of business data. It involves sharing extensive information with employees, business partners, vendors, OEMs, and others.

Management of data and documents in the telecom industry is of the highest priority. It has to ensure the documents’ security, validity, and integrity by having critical information about customers, contracts, & other confidential data.

Hand-written signatures on paper documents significantly slow down critical processes and have a detrimental effect on daily business operations.

You can digitally sign different documents in the telecom industry, some of which are:

New connection requests
Service requests and approvals
Internet services documents
Contracts and agreements
Invoices
E-statements
Purchase orders (PO)
Vendor agreements

4) Increase employee productivity and satisfaction

Sales employees spend most of the time-traveling, visiting client offices, follow-ups, and doing the usual printing, signing, scanning, and submitting customer applications, contracts, and other documents. They struggle to focus on their Key Result Areas (KRAs) due to these distractions and lack of time.

Electronic signatures boost employee productivity by rapidly closing sales much faster in comparison to physical documents. The sales team can focus on their job better as they don’t have to travel and do physical follow-ups with the clients anymore.

They can close sales, contracts, and agreements using eSignature applications from their offices or any other location and focus on other essential tasks like chasing monthly goals from other business accounts and meeting critical business deadlines connected with their KRAs.

5) Protect your loyal customers from telecom frauds

Telecom fraud is a severe threat to the telecommunication industry. Data fraud happens when the customers provide their ID documents during their onboarding stage in the company.

Another fraud SIM swap is a significant problem where scammers use fake IDs to access a subscriber’s SIM card. Then they use the SIM to authenticate transactions with the subscriber’s bank account and plunder his money to take full advantage of the situation.

Do you want to know the stage where customer IDs leak?

Customer IDs are leaked during the customer onboarding stage when companies receive physical documents from the customers.

How to avoid customer IDs leaks?

eSignature applications eradicate the time-consuming copying, scanning, and storing processes of physical documents. It is where there is a high probability of fraud due to leakage of customer data.

The technology stores the documents in digital format securely using cloud storage solutions that block all unauthorized attempts against data leaks.

Case Study

Telenor’s store in Norway ran on a franchise model. Multiple companies handled store operations that posed a significant customer support challenge due to the absence of a central document repository.

It forced the stores to manage paperwork and individual contracts at their own risk in warehouses.

If a customer approached a Telenor store to resolve their issues. Then it meant coming to the same store that had stored the documents of the customer. Another store could not service them due to the unavailability of customer documents.

Locating an older document meant a lot of work for the salesperson, as they had to travel to the document warehouse to search for the paper contract. It doesn’t always guarantee success as the crucial paper contracts get lost or damaged in storage facilities.

It resulted in customer dissatisfaction, increasing customer churn, as well as huge revenue loss.

Major Challenges

Support and Fraud

Slow resolution of customer issues as well as the fraud case due to decentralized documents

Customer churn

Large number of customers leaving Telenor & increasing churn costs

Presence of different systems

Multiple systems for sales, insurance, service, and finance increasing business operations complexity.

The Pain Point

Searching paper documents submitted in different stores
Paper documents getting lost
Slow resolution of customer issue
Rising cases of document fraud

Solution

Telenor adopted digital signature solutions for their rising needs. They used this technology to sign up documents generated by their internal systems and several partner systems.

The company was quickly able to digitize all the documents without any integration.

They got promising results:

Store managers and owners began concentrating more on what they do best: selling their products and services.
Customer support representatives started addressing customer issues on the first call due to rapid access to customer information.
The fraud department discovered contracts that were previously impossible to locate.

Conclusion

Electronic signatures automate critical business processes in the telecom sector, boosting customer acquisition, sales, employee productivity, and customer loyalty. If you’d like to learn more about how e signature solutions would help your telecom operations run more efficiently, connect with us now.

Aug

2021

Why Should The Retail Industry Use Electronic Signatures?

Global retail sales are expected to reach 26.7 trillion USD in 2022, up from 23.6 trillion USD in 2018. Retailers are doing business on a much bigger scale due to globalization and numerous trade agreements between the marketplaces and the governments.

Rapidly growing business activities in the retail industry mean bulk-hiring employees to attend to the huge footfall of customers in retail stores and managing the supply of retail products. This repetitive process generates tonnes of customer & supplier-based documents like sales receipts, sales orders, supplier forms, & a lot more. The traditional paper-based document signing process presents multiple challenges to the global retail industry, including high costs, procedural delays, lack of transparency, and security concerns.

Electronic signatures help address all the concerns by moving from paper-based to paperless documentation, improving customer and retail brand experience.

Types of retail business where you can use electronic signatures:

eCommerce store – Fully customized responsive online store that speaks to your customers and showcases your products.

Discount store – A retail store that sells products at a lower price than most of the other retail stores

Warehouses – They are used by manufacturers, importers, exporters, wholesalers, and transporters located on the outskirts of cities, towns, or villages.

Supermarket- A self-service shop offering a variety of food, beverages & household products.

Departmental stores – They are large-scale retail stores that deal in selling gods under one roof and single control.

Convenience stores- They are small retail businesses that stock everyday commodities like groceries, snack food, confectionery, etc.

Specialty stores – A specialty retail store focuses exclusively on a few product categories instead of retailers who sell a wide variety of consumer items.

Integrating electronic signatures in retail business

Retail businesses can integrate electronic signatures easily in their workflows by following these steps:

Download the eSignature application from the technology partner’s webpage
Open the app interface & upload a document for eSignature
Enter the email of other people to decide who receives the document
Type the message for email recipients to explain the document agenda
Draw, write or upload your signature using the eSignature interface
Click “Send” to share the documents on specified emails
Document stakeholders receive the signed documents by email

Opportunities in the retail industry for delivering more value with electronic signatures

Developing a flexible workforce

The retail industry requires additional staff to serve customers during holidays and other noteworthy events. As a result, they frequently need to hire quickly, even more so during the peak season.

For example, a large clothes retailer requires seasonal workers, which is challenging to secure in the temporary work industry. As a result, the hiring process must be accelerated from job posting to onboarding.

Electronic signatures eliminate the need for the contract signing, a substantial obstacle to the onboarding process. Employers and contractors benefit from quicker employee onboarding by increasing business responsiveness, thereby positively impacting customer experience.

Accelerated Supply chain

Nowadays, the retail industry is characterized by constant change, shorter product lifecycles, and uncertain demand. Supply chain agility demands the freedom to improve processes across supplier, logistics, and customs networks.

How to ensure supply chain agility?

Retail businesses can digitalize the supply chain using digital signatures. The technology helps by speeding up requisitions, approvals, and supplier contracts.

Great products require supply chains that enable businesses to enhance their services and consumer experiences.

Signing any form remotely

Every transaction in the retail sector needs some form of agreement. Here are some common types of paperwork used in the retail industry which can be signed by electronic signatures:

Recruitment contracts
Concession documents
Order invoice
Supplier application forms
Sales quotation
Purchase order invoice
Delivery notes
Sales return
Sales receipt
Sales order

Case Study

Introduction

Krispy Kreme is a famous doughnut company with over 100 stores in the UK and almost anywhere in the British Isles.

The Pain Points

Contract Management: Keeping track of new employee contracts was difficult as they had more than 2000 employees in hundred stores.

Slow recruitment process: The recruitment procedure was slowed down using paper-based documentation requiring multiple signatures and validation.

Lowering overall costs: For a company of the size of Krispy Kreme, the expenditures associated with stamps were quite substantial. Contracts for new hires, as well as contract changes as positions changed, contributed to the expense.

Solution

Easier employee contract search: Login to the eSignature solution and search for any employee contract, which is easier than paper copies.

Create new contracts: Electronic Signature is used for creating new contracts, amendment contracts, and any change in employment.

Save time on recruitment: The ease with which documents can be sent and received is remarkable. There is no wait, and employees are quickly integrated into the work culture, saving time on general recruitment.

Cost-cutting: Electronic signatures have significantly reduced costs by eliminating the requirement to deliver pre-stamped documents.

Why should the retail industry use electronic signatures?

Using electronic signatures has numerous benefits for the retail industry. Here are some of them:

Eliminate paperwork: Electronic signatures eliminate unnecessary paperwork for inventory reconciliation, staff timesheets, and printed receipts in retail, benefitting both the customer and the retailer.

The business saves time by guaranteeing that all information is readily accessible and searchable digitally, decreases storage expenses and space required to hold papers, and eliminates continuing expenditures associated with printers, ink, and paper.

For consumers, digital receipts offer greater convenience than paper receipts. Few customers appreciate the concept of carrying paper receipts, sorting and saving them at home in an era of digital wallets.

Improve customer experience: Customer experience is a top priority for many organizations. Research says that 80% of customers are more likely to purchase from brands offering personalized experiences to them.

Many clients dislike dealing with enormous stacks of paper agreements, contracts, warranties, and bills. It is annoying, time-consuming, and inconvenient. In this case, an electronic signature is beneficial as it improves the customer experience during the purchasing process saving enough time for customers to focus on other important tasks.

Save money: An important research by a leading news source states that an average US office spends USD 80/year on paper per employee, and 50%-70% of the office space is dedicated to filing and storage of documentation. Another study says that American companies spend an estimated USD 20 on labor costs to file a document, USD 120 on finding a misfiled document, and USD 220 to reproduce a lost document.

You can see that the cost of handling & reproducing a document multiplies after the document storage stage.

One significant way the retail industry can reduce the overall costs is by investing in electronic signatures solutions. The technology helps retail businesses in cutting costs related to document storage, security & management.

Save time: Electronic signatures in the retail industry are beneficial to everyone involved: suppliers, clients, and employees alike. It is possible to complete authorization more quickly due to the availability of documents and supporting resources in real-time. Employees will have more time to dedicate to listening to the demands of clients and suppliers as a result of this change.

Minimize hand-to-hand contact: Digital signatures eliminate the need to print, sign, and scan the document before giving it to the other parties, hence minimizing time spent in person for managing every document. Employees can always electronically sign and return the papers, and there is no physical touch between them at any stage during the process.

Conclusion

Electronic signatures have huge scope in the retail industry. When cost-cutting is more critical than ever, a simple investment in technology to enable paperless transactions can revolutionize retail productivity.

Along with cost and time savings, it has immense potential to enhance the customer experience, satisfy the expectations of the environmentally-conscious consumer, and assist the retail sector in reducing its environmental imprint.

Aug

2021

Benefits Of Electronic Signatures For The Real Estate Industry

The ultimate goal of every real estate business is to simplify its business processes, boost customer experience, increase profitability and cut costs. Every company in the industry is running a race to achieve them and striving to discover an intelligent solution that will improve company workflows & win customer loyalty while minimizing the operating expenses.

Electronic signatures are one technology that helps real estate companies avoid delays in signing documents and reduce the chances of misplaced papers, mismatched signatures, or document fraud that may lead to bad customer experience and deal cancellation.

How eSignature works for real estate agents?

Real estate agents can utilize the eSignature application to create, edit and prepare the purchase, sales and financing documents by following these steps.

Agents open the eSignature application on desktop, smartphone, or laptop
Upload the purchase, sales & financing documents in the application
Enter the client’s email address who will sign the documents electronically
Fill out the subject & message to the clients explaining the agenda of documents
Click send to share documents with the clients
The client receives email or app notification of receiving the documents
The client signs the received documents using the esignature interface & hits send button
The completed esigned copy is automatically sent to the agent
The deal is confirmed between the client and the real estate company

Factors to be considered while selecting an electronic signature for a real estate company:

1) Mobile Friendly: Is your eSignature application mobile-friendly? If yes, this will help real estate agents stay updated with every pending document on the move.

2) Integration: Does it allow integration with third-party tools to extend its functionality?

3) Storage limits: Does it help upgrade storage space if you reach your limits?

4) Security: Are your confidential transactions safe with the eSignature tool? How does it help protect the client & company interests?

5) Core usage: Can it be used for different activities in the real estate industry? Examples:

Administration: Approval, change requests, repair orders, appointments

Rentals: Contract renewals, termination notices, non-payment notification, payment authorization

Construction companies: Contract with the company, sub-contractors, Purchase orders

Buying & selling: Agreement with third parties, home insurance, Terms & conditions

Check out some of the fantastic benefits of electronic signatures for the real estate industry:

1) Faster closing of real estate deals electronically

You may face surprising issues at the time of closing sales like missing documents, missing signatures, client unavailability on specific dates, or sudden objections from signing parties that could slow down the closing of real estate deals.

LunarPen electronic signatures let real estate agents sign documents more speedily and efficiently from any location. The application assures that all necessary signed copies are available during the closing of deals.

The electronic signing of real estate documents offers these benefits to close real estate sales quickly:

Faster and efficient: There is no need to rush to sign, re-sign, and deliver the updated agreements. As a result, the closing times of the real estate sales reduce.

No chances of missing document: Never miss an important document when closing an agreement with your client. The application helps in managing all the necessary documents in a single place.

Review the documents before closing: Parties can receive the documents well before closing. So, there is plenty of time to seek clarifications, review, and understand the documents before signing.

2) Accuracy and efficiency of the signed documents

Any important real estate document may be signed incorrectly. The signee may leave some fields blank or forget to sign in some locations.

Incomplete or incorrectly filed real estate documents can invite unavoidable legal problems, fines, or penalties. In this case, the company may put the deal on hold until the issue is resolved.

If you use electronic signature applications to fill an online document, the software highlights the essential areas within agreements to ensure that you fill the entire document.

Due to such useful features, real estate companies do not have to spend time in error rectification and repeated documentation, thereby improving the accuracy & efficiency of business processes.

3) Get enhanced security for real estate documents

A real estate document is highly confidential as it contains sensitive information about the proof of a new property, agreement, taxes, and financial transactions.

You need a highly secure, hack-proof software application to secure these documents from theft and cyber-crimes.

A digital signature is equivalent to a handwritten or stamped seal built on robust security algorithms that only allow authorized personnel to access the documents.

The application uses different security processes like email authentication, login credentials, OTP over SMS, secret questions to protect, verify and validate the editing & access rights of sensitive information.

4) Offers pleasant experience to real estate customers

To buy or sell a property, every potential or existing real estate customer must go through complicated paperwork. The unending list of required documents may cause delays for both customers and companies.

Customers favor businesses with quick and easy processes.

Agents can utilise electronic signature software to reduce the stress of filling out time-consuming and error-prone paper contracts.

So, instead of waiting for contracts to arrive in the mail or awaiting clients to come into the office to sign, the application allows you to eSign and securely send the secret agreement,thereby improving customer experience.

5) Never lose your contracts again

Real estate companies can confidently store documents using eSignature technology as they utilize cloud storage solutions that keep all the sensitive eSigned records in a safer place. The technology ensures that you never lose a contract again due to misplacement of physical documents or manual errors.

If you have trouble finding the contracts of a specific company, then you need to have login credentials & view access rights to use the eSignature application. After that, you can download the online copy of the contract easily without wasting time.

Case Study:

Introduction

William Ryan Homes (WRH) is an award-winning home builder with 27 years of experience, 11,000 projects under its belt and offers single-family homes in Phoenix, Arizona, Tampa, Florida, Madison, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Chicago.

The pain points

Superintendents at WRH had to rush to print a work order ahead of time, carry it to the job site, hand gather the appropriate signatures, locate a scanner, and email the finalized document to the admin team.

Instead of utilizing email, the next step was sometimes to drive the physical document back to the office to fill them.

This process squandered a tremendous amount of time and resources.

The Solution

Electronic signatures offered a couple of exciting benefits to William Ryan Homes:

Time Savings

By digitizing their workflow, WRH improved their process time by 90% with electronic signatures.

Mobile compatibility

Mobile compatible eSignature apps allowed employees to get online and offline work done & sync their progress with the rest of their team.

Quicker Sales

Getting documents signed faster meant a faster build time that helped the property sell quickly to the customer.

Document centralization

With electronic signatures, all signed documents are available at a central location that can be sent anywhere instantly at a click of a button.

The sharpened focus of employees

WRH superintendents are now able to focus more on the home building process and what the customer wants.

Conclusion

Electronic signatures provide uncountable benefits to the real estate industry, from quickly closing sales, reducing face-to-face processes, managing paperwork, & improving customer satisfaction.

If you are trying to bring digital transformation to your real estate company. Sign Up with LunarPen right away to start using electronic signatures and turn around your business.

Jul

2021

How Does The Insurance Sector Benefit From Electronic Signatures?

What difference can a year make to the insurance industry? 2020 may be the answer. The ongoing pandemic transformed customer needs, habits, and expectations, stressing on overnight virtualization of operations.

Now, customers desire quicker transactions for insurance services. According to the PWC report, rising customer expectations are tipping the power balance in favour of the consumer.

The ripple impact of the switch is so strong that insurance businesses adopting a remote working model are struggling to adapt to these technological changes. It is directly impacting their brand name and customer service in the market.

To address these issues adequately, electronic signature technology has emerged as the strongest, fastest & safest option to approve insurance documents quickly.

Here is how the insurance sector benefits from electronic signatures:

1) Increase productivity of Insurance agents & employees

Electronic signature has become well known as a powerful technology to ease signing documents for clients, offering an impressive productivity boost for insurance agents and employees.

- You can adequately categorize and archive different types of insurance policies in digital format using this electronic method.

- You can send updates about the insurance deals status that helps reduce human error chances.

- You can track clients more quickly and efficiently, as every document that is signed, transmitted, opened, and read is handled from the eSignature dashboard.

- It ensures that insurance policies are not mixed, lost, or sent to the wrong address.

- Get more policy orders from customers, boosting productivity & business revenue.

- Automates insurance process flows and minimizes repetitive tasks.

2) Enhancing business efficiency

As paper or faxed insurance policy agreements are challenging to track, it isn’t easy to follow the steps of the clients in the process of signing documents. Different parts of the world are experiencing a lockdown, disrupting the document delivery methods and supply networks at all levels.

This situation makes it particularly difficult to track down actual insurance documents and the sudden absence of a critical stakeholder like the delivery partner can derail the entire process.

In this case, electronic signature technology allows for improved speed and transparency, allowing insurers to take action to move the process along by implementing reminder mechanisms or forwarding the documents to a new signing authority.

This mechanism saves precious time for the employees and the clients in follow-ups for document receipt acknowledgment, follow-ups for contract or agreement closure, thereby enhancing business efficiency.

3) Security Prioritization

As the insurance sector ventures into uncharted territory with digitalization, it is critical to guarantee sufficient checks and balances to ensure that the industry’s highly regulated norms are permanently adhered to and followed.

With so many data breaches hitting the insurance companies, there are so many questions to answer:

- How does the company handle the signed documents after receiving them from customers?

- How secure are the storage services used to store insurance documents?

It is pretty easy to tamper with paper-based documents, and even physical signatures get falsified easily.

Electronically signed papers route to high-tier data centers with SSL-encrypted endpoints and 256-bit AES encryption which are the most acceptable security measures to keep sensitive data safe at all times.

4) Mobility and speed in the signing of insurance policies

Customers can utilize an electronic signature to complete the entire onboarding procedure as fast as possible after acquiring a policy.

One of the most significant advantages of employing eSignatures in the insurance sector is that documental work is done from the comfort of one’s own home or anywhere globally using a computer, tablet, or smart device.

When the client has decided to purchase insurance policies, the electronic signature solution allows them to complete the documentation formalities and the related processes almost immediately without waiting for confirmation from the company’s end.

Customers’ confidence in utilizing eSignatures on the go grows as they sign insurance policies online.

5) Reduced spending on insurance paper policies

Research has estimated that 1.024 billion pieces of paper are required each year to deliver insurance policies and the cost to deliver these policies using paper is USD 703 Million.

Check out the savings to deliver insurance policies electronically:

- Reduce costs by up to 85%

- Cut more than 20 days off of delivery cycle times

- Reduce not-in-good-order policy delivery by 99%

Apart from that, an electronic signature results in significant savings in paper costs and other linked materials such as ink, scanners, and printers.

Furthermore, businesses that adopt paper-based processes create an image of being forward-thinking and environmentally conscious. These are the qualities that digital consumers highly value when evaluating service providers.

6) Improved insurance investment experience

Another significant advantage of electronic signatures in the insurance sector is that they assist in improving the insurance investment experience for clients.

Clients have gotten used to the older experiences of facing delays in taking insurance policies.

Digital signatures have given a magical transformation to the customer experience. You get instant verification and confirmation of purchased company policies, which serves as a differentiating element for world-class companies.

In addition to increasing the speed and efficiency of the policy signing procedure, it also reduces the danger of policyholders switching to another alternative carrier before the signature.

Case Study

Knight insurance group is a member of the Hankey Group of Firms, a financial services conglomerate centered in Los Angeles that consists of seven operating companies with 3,100 workers worldwide and $15 Billion in assets at the time of writing. It is a capital support provider and underwriting capability for casualty insurance programs and niche property. The group operates in six Midwest locations: Cincinnati, Cleveland, Toledo and Findlay, Ohio, Chicago, Illinois, and Indianapolis, Indiana.

In addition to delivering outstanding insurance products and financial services to people and businesses of all sizes, Knight Insurance Group has maintained its dedication to superior customer service.

Challenges

The Knight insurance group agents located at these six different locations were processing all paperwork manually. Their new clients took two weeks to fill out and return the applications. Because of this procedure, the likelihood of client churn grew, and administration times exceeded the desired time.

Solution

Following a thorough review of the process, Knight Insurance Group decided to investigate the possibility of digitizing the business processes. Following an inspection, the system administrator for the Knight Insurance Group began looking for alternative methods of completing the documentation. eSignature expedited the paperwork process, and after the research, they decided that eSignature was the most suited solution for such situations.

Benefits

Client forms that took two weeks to complete began arriving within one or two days, and they returned 75% of the documents within 24 hours of receipt.
Customers of Knight Insurance Group express high satisfaction with the ease, simplicity, and convenience of submitting papers by electronic signature.

Conclusion

An electronic signature massively benefits your insurance business. It moves you ahead of your competitors and prepares you to meet the needs and demands of the next generation.

eSignature solutions bring out the best in insurance companies that have adopted this technology. Sign up for a free eSignature account today.

Jul

2021

Benefits of using Electronic Signatures in the Healthcare Industry

Do you know that physicians waste two-third of their time doing paperwork? In the last two years, it has become overwhelming for them with a swelling number of patients, understaffed medical facilities, and challenges in recording and storing their data.

A study has confirmed that the amount of paperwork that doctors have to do is out of control. Physicians spent 27% of their time seeing patients in their offices and 49.2% of their time on paperwork. Even when doctors were in the examination room with patients, they spent only 52.9% of their time conversing with or examining them and 37% on paperwork.

The data is only the tip of the iceberg. We also have to consider medical insurance forms, claims, and the time spent filling these forms.

This study shows that the amount of paperwork is getting insane and worse over time.

The healthcare industry faces many changes like government regulations, technological innovations, and patient expectations that pose new challenges to healthcare organizations in 2021. Some of which are cybersecurity, patient experience, invoicing & payment processing.

The industry deals with sensitive client data exchanges every day. It is imperative to ensure that all client data is collected accurately, and precautions are needed to eliminate tampering of the medical document by assuring its safe storage and security.

What if there is a technologically proven solution to eliminate paperwork and enable a paperless document workflow with uncrackable security & safety?

Welcome to electronic signature technology! Using an eSignature solution, healthcare providers can speed up the collection of the consent of the doctor and patient while maintaining a level of compliance that meets traditional signatures or exceeds them.

Here are the core benefits of using electronic signatures in the healthcare industry:

1) Focus on the patients rather than the paperwork

For a long time, doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers have complained about the time-consuming paperwork, which they say is a massive waste of time. They cannot see as many patients in a day and can’t spend much time focusing on improving their medical condition.

These are the top 4 specialties in the medical industry spending most of the time on paperwork:

Psychiatrists (20.3%)
General practitioners (17.3%)
Internists (17.3%)
Paediatricians (14.1%)

LunarPen application helps reduce paperwork for your health staff to increase the quality of care received by the patient and focus more on saving their lives.

Electronic signatures help capture and securely store all the end-to-end details of patients in a single application, starting from paperless:

Admission of patients
Doctor’s prescription
Progress report
Discharge of patient
Medical insurance claims
Hospital bills

2) Fast track crucial processes in healthcare

Most healthcare processes were a bit different decades ago. In 2021, most hospitals practice the same age-old methods that waste both the patients and healthcare time. The hospital administrator would hand out registration forms for filling and signing patient information. It is still happening to plan & confirm doctors’ appointments, which would eventually get processed manually by the staff.

When it comes to medical records, we use hand-written signatures on every medical document.

After some time, the older document gets destroyed because it is no longer needed.

Below is the existing lifecycle of documents without electronic signatures:

Print – Sign – Scan – Store – Destroy

Digital transformation empowers the industry to sign documents on any digital device anytime, from anywhere. Secure cloud storage is responsible for the storage, retrieval, and disposal of records.

New lifecycle of documents with electronic signatures:

Sign – Store

You can see the complete reduction in process steps with eSignatures that helps fast-track crucial processes in the healthcare industry.

That means the moment you sign the documents with digital signatures, they are stored securely in the cloud without the need of printing-signing-scanning-storing. It brings several benefits to the ailing patient and the overloaded healthcare personnel, which are:

Patients don’t have to carry their medical documents every time
Doctors can make important decisions about patients quickly
Save expenses related to printing, copying, scanning & document storage
Verify the authenticity of medical bills with ease
Tampering is impossible with online medical documents

3) Keep confidential patient data secure

Manual signatures have physical limitations, like they can be misplaced, copied, or damaged easily. They take longer to create, collect and store, making them easily prone to destruction, theft, and forgery.

Also, they fail to capture relevant information like the party’s intent to sign or the verifiable date and time of signing of agreements.

Electronic signatures successfully fill all the gaps left opened by manual signatures.

All critical documents are present on the eSignature application in digital format, assuring complete confidentiality of patient’s data against any attempts to steal it.

The eSignature application is accessible only by trusted healthcare professionals approved by the admin that keeps the data safe from unwanted sources. Additionally, the electronic signature technology uses multi-factor authentication to enhance security by requiring signers to express the intent to sign by utilizing the E-signature application.

There are several available options like secret Q&A, user id & password, uploading identification images, and many others for e-sign transactions.

Such security measures assure that only the permitted person can edit, access, and view the data.

4) Improve patient experience

Patients usually waiting in long lines, having little or no time to read forms carefully, and experiencing delays in getting access to doctor’s care are not the ingredients for a positive patient experience.

Digitizing documentation is the most effective method of eliminating the need for patients to be held up by paperwork. Every documentation is covered in electronic signature application, whether onboarding, discharge forms, or improving the efficiency of insurance claims processing.

Healthcare professionals and patients can read, accept and sign the forms from the comfort of their own homes, thanks to the remote capabilities of the application.

Furthermore, as the physicians are no longer required to do the tedious task of covering documentation, they can give much-needed time to the patients, which is a win-win situation for everyone.

5) Legal compliance

There are numerous laws to safeguard businesses using electronic signature applications and provide the required legal compliance to paperless signatures for a smooth user experience in every industry. Check out the details of these laws that assure legal cover to eSignatures:

eIDAS: eIDAS facilitates electronic transactions between citizens, enterprises, and the governments of any state of the Union. It ensures a market for trust services and legally protects the electronic signature based processes. The tremendous benefit of eIDAS is that it is permissible across all EU countries and can be used to open up additional EU markets for businesses.

HIPAA: Compliance with HIPAA can be helpful to your business. They are trusted more in the market since patients and clients believe you keep their data secure. Its primary benefit is profitability. Loyalty to customers results in greater profitability for your company. A majority of insurance companies and employers in the US sponsor or co-sponsor their employees’ health insurance.

ESIGN: The ESIGN Act helps expedite the use of electronic signatures in all places where federal laws apply. It ensures that eSignatures are permitted in the courts as credible evidence. Additionally, it makes sure that electronic documents have indisputable proof of validity, effect, and enforceability.

UETA: UETA provides a legal framework for electronic signature use per state. It is used to deal with everything from transferable records to automated transactions and record retention. 48 US states have adopted it.

Digital signature complies with the requirements of all the laws and assists organizations in meeting compliance requirements across the health industry. It covers health plans, medical equipment manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and providers by managing the signing process and ensuring that all information is authenticated and kept secure.

Case Study

Chupik Counseling has provided mental health services to central Texas patients for nearly three decades. Bread and butter for the therapists and counselors are therapy and counseling, offering evaluations, medication management, and additional services. In the year 2020, they opened five brick-and-mortar locations. During the severe global health crisis, their telehealth initiatives expanded rapidly.

Challenge

The CEO of the company, Jeffery Chupik, was a big believer in face-to-face therapy. Then in the year 2020, as the global pandemic struck, the entire world changed, shunning physical interactions and relying more on digital mediums for meetings.

It didn’t take long for staff to realize that they had no proper system to get patient consent for their telehealth services. They needed a solution to rapidly onboard new patients that didn’t rely on face-to-face meetings.

The Pain Point

Chupik required a rapid transition to telehealth to bring their onboarding and consent process online.

The Solution

Electronic signature made customer onboarding easier by including links to readymade onboarding document templates instead of PDF files. As the patient signs forms, their therapists automatically receive a digital copy of the patient with all the details.

Here are the features that clicked electronic signatures with Chupik:

Lightning-fast adoption

In a matter of a few hours, Chupik was able to get started with eSignatures. No complicated setup backed by quick and convenient signing.

Time-saving templates

It is easier to create templates easily for commonly used documents.

Conclusion

More efficient patient service is possible while maintaining compliance and standards by utilizing a digital eSignature solution. If you are a healthcare service provider and interested in using digital signatures to boost the efficiency of existing healthcare processes, please get in touch with us now.

Frequently Asked Questions

What documents could healthcare companies be signing?

Every document can be quickly converted into an online format using the readymade templates of electronic signatures. Healthcare companies can sign multiple documents like:

Patient intake form
Patient consent form
Care documents
Billing documents
Provider agreements
Claims processing forms
Drug prescriptions
Lab reports
Staffing forms
HIPAA forms

Are e signatures on medical forms and records legally enforceable?

Medical forms and records are among the documents that can be signed electronically, including prescriptions and medical records.

The Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA) and the Global and National Commerce Act (GNCA) must be taken into consideration when determining the conditions necessary for electronic signatures under HIPAA law (ESIGN Act).

Both the UETA and ESIGN establish that electronic signatures and forms have the same weight and legal effect as hand-written signatures and traditional paper documents, just as they do with hand-written signatures and conventional paper documents. A specific provision of the ESIGN Act specifies that the signed document’s legal enforceability cannot be denied in electronic format.

What are the requirements of e signatures under HIPAA?

Electronic signatures are not under HIPAA rule. They are acceptable if they are compliant with the ESIGN Act and the UETA Act.

The conditions of the UETA and ESIGN Act are:

Legal compliance: The contract, document, agreement, or authorization should comply with federal rules for e-signatures, must display the terms, and should offer the signatory the option to receive a printed or emailed copy of the contract.

User Authentication: For preventing disputes, the covered entities must implement a system to validate the identity of all parties in the contract. Two-step verification can solve this problem.

Message Integrity: It is necessary to implement a system to ensure the integrity of the agreement. This condition is similar to the HIPAA security requirements for electronic communications and therefore deserves the same level of importance.

Ownership and control: The requirement is to make e-signatures HIPAA-compliant to stored signed documents on servers of e-signature service providers.

How can eSignature technology be used in the healthcare industry?

Here are the other important uses of electronic signatures in the healthcare industry:

Customer documentation: Every patient has a file that keeps their documents intact. Often, patients need to sign the papers. Doctors can also eSign the documents during a patient’s checkup.

Approving medical procedures: All hospitals require consent from all patients before engaging in any process. It is necessary to prevent a patient from making a charge in court against the hospital.

The signing of medical certificates: A certificate issued by a medical professional verifies an individual’s ability and approval by the relevant healthcare provider. The medical profession can use eSignature solutions for healthcare signing of documents.

Medical receipts: An electronic signature is used instead of manual stamps to prevent faded or unclear stamps.

Jul

2021

How e-Signatures Improve Business Efficiency

Every single company in the world is fighting hard for improving business efficiency in 2021. It’s about maximizing your output from given inputs and getting the most out of existing resources. Please take a look at some of the most successful companies in the world. They know how to optimize their available resources and extract maximum quality output from them.

A company can’t afford to be inefficient in a competitive market as it drastically increases the operating costs, impacting quality, output, and the company’s brand image. It is difficult to withstand market pressure and counter the demand-supply chain effectively. Unfortunately, inefficiency is a hard-hitting reality that is troubling companies every single business day, costing up to 30% of their revenue every year.

How to improve business efficiency?

A tested way is to make companies well organized and productive by introducing electronic signatures in their workflows.

Here is how electronic signatures improve business efficiency:

1) Limit interruptions in business

Interruptions are killing productivity at work. Forbes research says that around 71% of people report frequent interruptions during working hours. These unwanted interruptions are destroying their ability to stay creative and focussed.

Interruptions can be in various forms like:

Leaving your work and running to the clients to get their signatures
Continuous reminders & follow up with the clients to sign documents
Getting up from your work desk to print-scan-mail the document
Reminding other signees using calls, email to sign the document
Getting regular calls from your boss to confirm sales agreement
Lengthy follow up on emails to close the pending task
Long meetings to tackle & complete the stuck-up business process

Electronic signatures help limit interruptions in business by

Preparing documents online & eliminating the vicious cycle of printing-signing-mailing the documents
Document tracking feature enables you to track the signees as to which people have signed the form and who have still not signed it
eSignature apps allow you to send document notification to people who have not signed the form
Your standard business processes would not be stuck up due to your absence in the office, as the application is used remotely from any location.
Your busy clients don’t have to leave their physical locations to get the essential contracts signed, thereby saving companies’ time.
You can speedily sign and email the document simultaneously without any wait time.

2) Save time

Signing of physical documents can be a time taking process for most of the companies. A process takes three days on an average to capture a physical signature. Sometimes, it may take more than a week to complete the entire process of signing, scanning, and mailing the concerned documents.

There can be multiple reasons responsible for stretching the timelines to complete the process:

The concerned signee is not present in the office for signing documents
Office hardware like printers and scanner are not functioning well
The original document has been stolen, copied, or forged, forcing the process to start from scratch

When you use electronic signatures:

The average time to sign a form reduces from weeks to just 1-5 minutes.
You don’t have to wait for the physical presence of concerned employees as they can electronically sign a document using their smartphones from remote locations.
You don’t have to get up from your workspace & leave your prioritized job to do printing & scanning activities.
You avoid the chances of fraudulent activities that consume lots of business time as stored documents can’t be copied, scanned, and stolen.

3) Nullify risks associated with printing, scanning & copying of documents

There are multiple risks with paper documents during the process of printing, scanning & copying like:

Sometimes, a printed document is left in the paper tray where anyone from the office can copy it leading to a data breach
Staff members with access to confidential information can print, scan or copy the information freely
No automatic security alert is sent on printing, scanning, and copying any personal or confidential information
Anyone from the office can access the confidential documents stored in the memory of printing & scanning machines and send them to anyone
You can’t track printing, scanning, and copying activities associated with physical documents

Electronic signatures help tackle each of these risks very effectively in day to day business.

eSignature applications make use of cloud solutions to store highly confidential documents. Only concerned employees with access privileges can view, access and edit the contract or agreement. Every time there is an action on the document, a security notification updates all the respective stakeholders.

With eSignature at your service, you don’t have to worry about security risks and data leakage happening due to unauthorized activities.

4) Simplify your workflow

Paperwork is challenging to integrate into the business systems. Multiple steps need integration with the existing business processes. The physical documents need printing and scanning before you can use their details in regular business processes.

But with electronic signatures, you can use them without any further delay!

The reason behind this is that eSignatures simplify business systems that are already in use. You don’t have to prepare contracts or agreements manually, as eSignatures apps use ready-made templates to prepare contracts online.

When both parties sign the online contract on eSignature application, the signed agreement is stored securely on cloud solutions eliminating the need for printing, scanning & storage of documents.

When there is a need to retrieve the signed contract, you don’t need to find it from a massive pile of agreements. You only need to have the company’s approval to access the document stored in the cloud.

Such systematic business workflow ensures that business processes are quicker, speedier, and more secure, with no chances of manual error and document fraud.

Furthermore, eSignature makes the signing process more enjoyable by enabling faster signing between the parties and reducing drop rates of contracts/agreements.

That’s why employees & customers prefer digital signatures to pen and paper signatures as it is more user-friendly and contributes to a positive customer experience that helps attract more & more business.

5) Helps cut costs and increases company incomes

Digitization of business contracts and agreements lowers the storage space and the need for resources like paper, pen, courier costs, photocopies, etc., reducing overall costs by over 30%.

It also boosts company income by:

Speeding up client acquisition
Increasing contract & agreement signing rates
Increasing employee efficiency and productivity
Cutting unnecessary travel costs for client meetings
Requiring 80% less time for employee onboarding
Reducing the average length of sales cycle by a factor of 8 times
Eliminating hidden costs associated with human error

Digital signatures help increase cost-effectiveness, simplify the compliance process, and improve customer experience. Most importantly, the digitization of business empowers companies to tackle the threat of any competition at any time.

6) Boost remote work productivity

If we go by the physical workflow, employees get bombarded with repetitive, time-consuming tasks that eat up every spare second, profoundly affecting the focus and the right kind of thoughts to do the job smartly.

You got some excellent news with electronic signatures!

You can easily integrate this technology into existing business processes and see a quick boost in the employee and the organization’s productivity. Its time-saving features help streamline their business process to become easily adaptable and faster while offering an excellent experience for both the customers and the employees working remotely or from the office.

With an easy-to-use eSignature application like LunarPen, one can save nearly 40-50 hours per month by transforming the existing workflow and removing the need to print, scan and mail the document.

Conclusion

Want to improve business efficiency?

Electronic signatures are the safest way to eradicate interruptions in daily business operations, simplify daily workflow, cut costs and boost company productivity.

eSignature assures leaner turnaround time and excellent business efficiency as it removes the workflow obstructions and positively improves the customer experience of the application.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a valid e Signature?

In the ESIGN Act, an electronic signature is defined as “an electronic sound, symbol, or process attached to or logically associated with a contract or other record and executed or adopted by a person with the intent to sign the record.”

eSignatures refer to an electronic process that indicates acceptance of an agreement or record. They use various electronic authentication methods to verify the signer’s identity, such as password protection, corporate ID, email, or a PIN.

The proof of signing demonstrates via a secured process that includes an audit trail and a tamper-evident digital signature embedded into the esigned document.

How do I verify an electronic signature?

To verify whether a document or PDF is digitally signed and trusted successfully, the easiest thing is to open the signing panel in the Adobe reader for the document and check whether there is a green checkmark next to the signer’s signature.

The green tick shows that:

The signature is valid.
The document is un-modified since the application of signature
The signature includes an embedded time-stamp
Presence of signature details like last checked with details
Signer’s identity is valid
Signature is LTV enabled

What does signing electronically mean?

Electronically signing the documents means using a digital device to sign documents in electronic format. You can sign documents online using a smartphone, laptop, tablet, or using a mouse. It helps your business go paper-free and eliminate time-consuming activities like printing, scanning, and mailing documents.

Here is how you can use the LunarPen app to sign documents electronically

Create a document using ready-made templates
Upload online documents using Google cloud or Dropbox
Use the signed document sharing feature
Use the LunarPen interface to sign the document
Receive esigned documents by email

What is the best eSignature software?

LunarPen is the best eSignature software trusted by over 1 lakh professionals at leading companies.

Look at some of the exciting features of the LunarPen App:

High-level security: Signatures collected via eSignature apps are legal and secure. Each party confirms their identity via a secret code sent via SMS to sign.

Legally Binding: All signatures collected via LunarPen are compliant with EU norms and automatically generate a time-stamped proof-file to safeguard your agreements.

Integrate with 3rd party apps: Seamlessly connect your LunarPen account to popular cloud storage solutions like Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, or Evernote, and even sign documents right from within Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, and the Google Chrome browser.

Sign documents from anywhere: No more printing, scanning, or faxing. An easy-to-use and fast signing experience, signing documents is a breeze from your phone and computer - whether at your desk or on the beach.