eSignatures

28
Sep
2021
How Can Electronic Signatures Help The Logistics Industry?

How Can Electronic Signatures Help The Logistics Industry?

Documents are at the heart of all logistic processes. Many logistics companies struggle to stay on top of the avalanche of paperwork, toil with obsolete software, and fumble through sophisticated workflows. These problems intensify when the supply chain spans international borders.

Different industrial sectors use logistics to plan & control the movement of goods and services within a supply chain. The only concern is the paperwork to keep records, track stored and shipped goods.

Every industrial sector is witnessing a digital transformation in 2021, and even the logistics industry is waiting for a solution that allows them to do online paperwork without any hassles, complexity, and delays.

An electronic signature is the critical technological solution desired by every player in the logistic industry for a faster documentation process, significantly reducing the risk of legal disputes by providing more substantial tamper-proof digital evidence.

Logistic documents that need electronic signatures

  • Consignment Notes
  • Online contract signing
  • Bill of lading (BOL)
  • Freight bill
  • Delivery order
  • Dock receipt
  • Waybill form
  • Customer Agreement
  • Certificate of Origin
  • Cargo Insurance Certificate
  • Dangerous Good Declaration note
  • Packing List
  • Delivery Note

Are eSignatures safe for signing logistic-related documents?

International laws like ESIGN, UETA and the EIDAS Act support electronic signature technology, which gives logistic businesses the authority to use it for international business opportunities.

Additionally, digital signatures have many security and authentication layers like HTTPS connection, multi-factor authentication, cloud storage & user privacy to protect and store the eSigned documents, along with court-admissible transaction proof (Audit Trail)backed by the law. Such strong measures make eSignatures incredibly safe for signing any logistics-related documents.

Why does the Logistics industry need electronic signatures?

The logistics industry contributes a lot to the economic growth of countries. There is a constant need to keep up with the demand for faster delivery of goods and services related to FMCG, manufacturing & other sectors. That’s not all - logistic companies need to comply with more regulations as they target domestic and international clients. These companies must adopt innovative practices and technology to make the distribution process faster to meet these demands.

It is only possible through quick signing & approval of logistic documents related to the agreement, packaging, and safe receipt of goods at the customer end. eSignatures assure better integrity, visibility, and security in the logistics process enabling businesses to reduce costs, improve customer satisfaction, and comply with emerging regulations.

How electronic signatures benefit the logistics industry?

Improve supply chain visibility: Electronic signatures are the best way to ensure that critical documents are signed before the actual shipment gets completed. It provides the highest level of security and also helps reduce errors in communication between the involved parties.

The technology improves supply chain visibility by providing a validated proof of delivery from the moment goods leave suppliers to the minute they reach their destination. It has been made possible through a digitization process by securing and managing digital data to be shared, tracked, and communicated quickly.

Get rid of paperwork: Paperwork is one of the most time-consuming, tedious, and error-prone aspects of logistics. The number of documents that need signatures for each shipment is staggering, especially when most shipments cross multiple borders. With electronic signatures, all parties can sign and approve documents in real-time electronically.

Reduce Operational costs: In the logistics industry, a shipment can have at least six documents that need to be signed by various stakeholders, including the carrier, warehouse operator, and the buyer - all of which require an in-person visit to sign. It results in a rise in operational costs. Digital signatures help cut these costs by eliminating the need for these visits and enabling everyone to sign documents from their desktops or mobile devices digitally.

Improves Productivity: According to Forrester, there will be an 85% improvement in productivity by adopting e-signatures. Once you have e-signatures integrated into your business, you will be able to create effortlessly, sign, and send documents online, substantially speeding up the entire process. Once less time is spent on document processing and signing, the team may focus on more vital tasks such as closing sales and making logistic deliveries on time.

Case Study

Halvor Lines is a family-owned and operated trucking and logistics firm. With an exceptional staff of drivers, they provide premium transportation and logistical services across the US and Canada. America’s Best Fleets to Drive For (seven years running), several EPA awards, and American Heart Association distinctions for Halvor’s focus on driver and employee health.

Challenge

As Safety Office Administrator, Kendra Payette manages compliance and driver log infractions with a team of five. The safety department’s goal is to meet industry requirements and correct errors.

Those goals were practically hard to achieve before using electronic signatures. Halvor’s drivers are regularly on the road across the US & Canada, so they rarely have time to stop by a terminal and sign a document on-site. In some situations, it used to take up to a year to deliver a wet ink signature, and by then, months had passed since the driver’s violation was logged.

Due to these extensive delays, the safety department could not respond quickly and was vulnerable to regulatory risks.

Halvor Lines went digital to bridge this massive distance between drivers and their documents.

Solution

Halvor Lines finalized an eSignature solution. Here is how it’s workflow has helped solved the challenges:

Complete compliance

Rather than waiting months – or even a year – for their dispersed drivers to sign documents in person, the application enables Halvor to get eSignatures from on-the-go drivers. Regardless of their location, drivers may use their tablets to view and edit logs on the fly. As a result, the organization may comply with all applicable standards and requirements, save significant time, and avoid unwelcome DOT audits.

Signage on the road

Passenger forms authorize drivers to transport a passenger in their truck. Drivers can phone the office and request the document that is transferred to their tablet. The driver can then sign and return the passenger form at their leisure - no physical paperwork is required.

Streamlined human resource management

Due to the geographical dispersion of Halvor Lines’ drivers, the application makes it much easier to collect their signatures if anything changes in their personnel file (insurance, salary, etc.). Previously, HR had to mail documentation to each driver’s physical address, a time-consuming process that caused considerable delays.

Management of mobile devices

Each driver has a tablet that the IT department handles. IT can manage which mobile apps and permissions are available to drivers and pre-install the app on each tablet with the driver’s unique login already configured. It eliminates the need for drivers to waste time performing technical tasks: they merely need to sign a document and click submit to have it forwarded to the office.

Conclusion

Electronic signatures help the logistic industry accelerate its digital transformation and reduce its dependability on paper by running operations more quickly, efficiently, and with higher-quality data. It makes the technology highly critical for businesses with a strong market reputation.

Sign up for a free e-Signature account to put your logistic firm years ahead of the competition and enhance its sales, delivery, and customer understanding.

Posted by Lunar Pen in eSignaure Law, 0 comments
21
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.

Posted by Lunar Pen in eSignaure Law, 0 comments
01
May
2021

Why e-Signatures Should Be a Part of Your Digital Transformation

Do you know that the global spending on digital transformation will exceed 2.4 Trillion USD by 2024, making it the number one priority for a company’s IT initiatives in the world?

Companies’ efforts to transform digitally have begun, and by 2023 the digitally transformed organizations are expected to contribute to more than half of global GDP.

But important research shows that only 8% of the global companies have achieved their targeted business outcomes from their investment in digital technology. It means over 90% of companies still struggle to live up to the promise of a technological business model.

So, why is it that a large number of companies are failing to transform digitally?

Incorrect goals, lack of clear strategy, and failure to adapt to new changes are crucial reasons for its failure.

What is Digital Transformation?

Is this only about getting rid of physical paperwork and documentation?

Digital Transformation is the process of integrating digital technology into crucial business areas to optimize its speed, security, and reliability, thereby completely changing the way you do business and deliver values to the customer.

A digital transformation strategy is a key to help a company grow and provides an excellent opportunity for core business functions like marketing, human resource, and finance to move away from traditional processes, automate these areas, enabling leaders to focus on broader business opportunities.

One of the critical elements that must be part of the transformation is eSignatures.

However, in 2021, still, esignatures are not widely used in different industrial sectors despite numerous benefits like cost savings, time savings, productivity boost, and overall customer experience.

One good news for you, the current pandemic is forcing small, medium, and extensive business organizations to digitize their process and maintain an online business presence in the market.

These are the top reasons why eSignatures should be a part of your digital transformation:

  • Improves User Experience:

The pandemic led to the unexpected closure of a large number of private and public companies. Collaborations, agreements, signatures, and multiple manual processes came to a grinding halt. After a hiatus of more than a year, businesses had tons of pending paperwork, unclosed requests, and incomplete processes.

eSignature removes the excess load from your work by transforming physical processes (Print-Sign-Scan-Mail) into digital processes (Create-eSign-Email) without any dependency on manual paperwork.

Digital processes followed by eSignature do not depend on the physical availability of a person to print, sign and mail the documents. You can electronically sign online documents on secure cloud storage solutions on your own trusted device from anywhere. Organizations adopting eSignature in their daily business processes have complete peace of mind as there are no chances of pending paperwork getting stuck in the absence of office closure. It has helped improve the user experience as it allows businesses to continue operations with ease and gives a competitive edge over other players in the market.

  • Empowers people to work in new ways

Employees using eSignature applications do not need an office presence to execute crucial business processes. It keeps moving your business forward regardless of your company in any part of the world.

Here are the examples of how professionals in different industries have left old ways and adopted new working habits using eSignature solutions.

Digital Transformation in Healthcare: Doctors don’t have to depend on physical documents to hand over prescriptions and sign patient records and other documents. Increased use of electronic signatures has helped doctors prepare and share prescriptions digitally, reducing huge paper loss, theft, and tampering. Now healthcare can be speedily delivered to patients with faster document approvals, faster document sending, and faster document receiving.

Digital Transformation in Insurance: Customers can sign the necessary documents, anytime and anywhere in seconds, to get insurance policies. After customers choose to buy a policy, they can use an electronic signature to complete the process quickly. The procedure can be done with any digital device almost immediately from home or anywhere else.

Digital Transformation in Banking: With e-signatures, employees and consultants spend more time developing customer connections and less time doing business. Earlier, it took so much time printing & filling KYC forms, entering information, copying, and then scanning the image or documents back into digital format. Electronic signatures have freed bankers and employees to talk with customers and give them the needed value.

  • Complete User Control

No technology in the world gives the customer more power to check

  • Who VIEWS the document?
  • Who EDITS the document?
  • Who SIGNS the document?

There are numerous policy guidelines for the use of eSignatures.

  • The organization must provide a detailed and up-to-date statement of all requirements to the user.
  • The second rule is to inform the user that they have the right to withdraw their consent at any time.
  • The third one is that the consumer will face no legal or financial consequences.

These guidelines provide the user with more control and protect them against coercion. The use of eSignatures helps your users to know that they care about their best interests. It promotes excellent communication and interaction between the company and the customers, which is an important way of gaining feedback.

  • Saves time

By using the LunarPen platform, organizations can complete approvals and agreements in hours instead of days. It helps avoid all the time wastage and the manual work done to prepare, approve, print, and sign the documents as they can be created, edited, and stored online securely on cloud applications accessible only by authorized users.

Companies using LunarPen can track the status of signed documents putting an end to these questions:

  • Where are the documents?
  • Who has not signed the documents?
  • Why have they not signed the documents?

So, no more wastage of valuable business hours if

  • Your office is closed
  • Signer is absent due to leave
  • Printing/Scanning machines not working
  • Desktops/Laptops have crashed

Professionally, this is what organizations want – save significant time in daily business operations and serves clients quickly without any delay as time is money.

The most significant benefit of digital transformation is helping companies meet their business deadlines and serve their customers at lightning speed.

  • Improvement in Employee productivity

E-signatures boost productivity by empowering sales and simplifying operations. According to the Forrester study, signing onboarding documents online would save a typical organization 49,000 worker hours over three years and 2.5 hours per new hire.

Now an employee can work peacefully on a project without distractions as there are little chances of him leaving the current work and searching old project documents from a massive pile of paper.

Here is how eSignatures improve employee productivity:

  • Employees don’t lose time due to document collaboration issues
  • Helps in streamlining workflows to execute processes quickly
  • Uses new age storage methods to optimize productivity levels
  • Get eSignatures from the right parties on time
  • It helps achieve your aim of a paperless office
  • Improves online collaboration of employees
  • Ensures working on a project with complete focus

  • Top Security

According to a recent study, the digital signature market is expected to grow by USD 2.77 Billion between 2020-2024, at a CAGR of 27 percent during the forecast period. It means that in a few years, a large number of professionals will use esignatures for online business transactions questioning digital signature security.

Security is the biggest barrier in adopting digital signatures as businesses are increasingly worried about document forgery, data leakage, and increased risks of fraud.

Compared to traditional paper documents that are easy to forge and copy, esignatures provide a way to sign documents digitally and officially, thereby making them suitable for safer online transactions.

Not all electronic signatures are built with the same level of security. But these are what distinguishes a safer eSignature solution from the riskier ones:

Certificate Authority (CA): eSignature is associated with a third-party certificate authority (CA) to verify that a valid signature has been added to the document.

Audit Trail: Uses audit trail to store the record about the users who have viewed, edited, and accessed the document. It ensures information integrity at all times and can be used as valid legal evidence in any court of law.

User Authentication: Instantly verifies and authenticates your customer identity from any location, anytime.

Compliance: Complies with regulations like ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS (SP) Level 1, UETA & the ESIGN Act.

Conclusion

eSignature is a boon for organizations trying to provide efficiency, transparency, and security in the digital process not found in traditional signatures. eSignature offers many benefits in the digital transformation journey of an organization, like improving employee productivity, safety, enhancing customer experience, maintaining compliance, and a lot more. Companies adopting electronic signatures will find themselves one step closer to the digital future.

Click here to learn more about eSignatures and how you can quickly adopt this technology without any further delay.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an eSignature example?

An eSignature example includes

  • A signature created using your fingers on the touch screen of a smartphone, tablet, or any digital device
  • Using a mouse to draw a signature on a laptop/desktop screen
  • You are using a keyboard to type in your signature or uploading and using the scanned image of the person’s ink signature.

Is there an app for electronic signatures?

Yes! The LunarPen eSignature app provides an easy way to upload, eSign the document, and share it with trusted sources.

Do electronic signatures hold up in court?

Lunarpen Electronic Signatures meet all strict requirements defined in the United States and Europe for safety and authentication. Your documents are legal and enforceable in a court of law.

What makes an electronic signature legal?

There must be a signer’s intent to accept and execute the agreement to qualify as a legal electronic signature. It requires the signer to take affirmative action like using a mouse or a touchscreen device to draw their signature, uploading a scanned signature, or using the keyboard to type your name as a signature.

Posted by Lunar Pen in eSignaure Law, 0 comments
24
Apr
2021

How to Improve Customer Experience with Esignatures

Customer service is an opportunity to exceed your customer expectations - John Jantsch

Did you know that investing in customer experience initiatives has the potential to double your revenue in 36 months?

Don’t be surprised!

Another research by American Express found that 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience (CX).

What is customer experience (CX)?

Is it about offering freebies, rewards, coupons, or heavy discounts to make a customer happy?

Not at all! - it is more about self-motivating the customer to do business transactions with the brands in speedy and convenient manner.

So, let’s redefine customer experience, which is “Creating an emotionally satisfying, positive experience with your brand or business, that leaves the customer feeling happy and satisfied that they did business with the brand.”

Why is customer experience important?

We all know companies have everything - the latest technology, lavish showrooms, the costliest hardware & products in the world to attract a customer.

But is it sufficient to build a lasting bond with the customer?

Did we forget an essential ingredient?

Yes!

Sometimes companies stop conveying human emotions connected with customer experience.

An excellent customer experience can be due to multiple reasons found helpful by a customer like helping finalize a product quickly, offering excellent competitive pricing for the products, or exceptional after-sales service to make a customer happy.

A positive customer experience:

- Increases brand loyalty

- Improves brand image

- Better customer engagement

- Boosts organic business growth

- Helps stand out in the competition

- Ensure positive word of mouth publicity

Improving customer experience with electronic signatures

eSignatures significantly improve customer experience by providing blazing fast access to customer services like esigning documents, KYC, customer approvals, Tax return filing, legal services, HR services, and many more. They are popular in the industry for their speed and simplicity. As for businesses, they reduce paperwork, cut short the time in signature and approval of the contracts, workforce hiring, limit purchases of printing devices, and storage of physical documents.

So, how do eSignatures improve customer experience?

  • No more waiting time to access services

According to a study, eSignatures reduce the average document processing time from five days to 37 minutes.

If you want to purchase a mobile sim, apply for a banking loan or sign a crucial document, you don’t need to sign a physical document and wait for weeks or more for the company’s confirmation and access to these services.

You get instant access to the needed services by signing in electronically from your own trusted device and complete the service formalities in no time. The application is instantly verified and accepted by the company. You get full access to the applied services the same business day. Apart from this, it saves you from the lengthy hassles of printing the application & identity document, self-attesting, and mailing it to the company for verification and confirmation.

  • Fully secure to use

Using a physical document for daily business activities brought in many issues like managing, storing, and keeping it safe from getting stolen or forged for misuse. There were frequent cases of the stored documents getting lost or leakage of the customer details.

In contrast, the esignature technology does document management systematically as all your documents are present in the cloud, with no chances of confidential data getting leaked or lost. You can share the document within or outside the professional network safely and securely.

Is eSigning a document safe?

An eSignature solution uses

  • Advanced Electronic Signature (AES) to ensure protection against forgery
  • 256-bit HTTPS advanced encryption is complicated for hackers to breach security

These eSignature security measures confirm that no one is spying on your connection.

Customers or businesses can fully trust esignature solutions to sign online contracts securely, initiate service or key announcements without doubting the source and authenticity of the signed document.

Ensuring a secure business environment helps reinstate customer faith in a brand, encouraging them to do more business transactions without the fear of their identity or confidential data getting stolen for misuse.

  • It helps track your documents

Physical documents are challenging to track. You have to constantly follow up with different stakeholders in the company or with new partners or clients on phone calls, emails & physical visits to know the signed documents’ status and remind other people who have still not signed it.

eSignature helps you make this task easy. Here is how you can easily track and esign the documents using LunarPen

  • Create or upload a document
  • Add signers’ email to decide who receives the document
  • Use LunarPen app to add eSignature box, date & time
  • Send the document for eSignature
  • Use the LunarPen interface to eSign your document
  • Track your document online

Now, no more wondering where the documents are, no more chasing them down, and no more delays. You can track the live status of your documents anytime.

  • Enables self-service for faster response

Customers want a solution for their problems, and they want it fast. The most important attribute of customer experience is fast response time.

How can you respond faster to a customer?

By customer self-service. Do you know that more than 40% of customers prefer self-service over human contacts?

In 2021, self-service is not a choice. It’s an absolute necessity.

It empowers your customers to explore service and find answers on their own.

How eSignature provides Self-servicing benefits to customers in 2021?

  • Faster service: You don’t have to rush to the printer & mail department for printing-scanning-mailing the physical document. One single tap on the eSignature app lets you speed past the create-sign-email cycle in minutes.
  • Less room for error: Even well-trained, experienced professionals make errors in creating and signing a document. When you use eSignature solutions, you create online documents with a lesser probability of mistakes in a shorter time.
  • Customer Satisfaction: As you use eSignature apps on your own, it gives you total command, confidence, and satisfaction in knowing, experiencing, and using the app features.
  • Simplify and modernize the sales process

A traditional purchasing process involves showing multiple product options to the customer. Based on the customer choice, a contract or agreement is worked out between the customer and the business to supply the product and complete the sales process. It is a lengthy process where many terms and conditions are negotiated & renegotiated between the parties before signing the actual agreement.

It’s time to modernize the purchase process!

What if you get a customized agreement, mutually agreed by both parties, without the stress of paperwork?

An eSignature solution helps you eSign the contractual documents instantly using digital devices. You don’t need to travel to sign a document, plus you get a super thrilled and delighted customer impressed with the speed and experience of the digital purchase process. It significantly improves the customer experience as they get the privilege to use the latest technology to execute essential business operations.

Case Study

Amway utilized the speed and efficiency of eSignatures to register new distributors for its products and increase revenue in European markets.

Challenge

The biggest challenge to expand in the European markets was to acquire new independent distributors. As a part of the process, contracts were printed, signed, and sent to prospective distributors for review and then sent back to Amway.

However, multiple contracts were returning to the company with missing information and signature. Returning a document without a signature meant a lot for the company, which meant that contractual terms were not acceptable to the distributor. In that case, the contract had to be sent back to prospective distributors for confirmation again. Apart from this, several agreements were lost in the mail, forcing the company to restart the contract process from scratch.

The manual process wasted a lot of business time, created confusion, and increased loads of manual paperwork.

Solution

Amway decided to change the distributor onboarding model from offline to online model using the esignature solution. It made the contractual signing process faster as distributors got the flexibility to sign contracts on the move using a mobile device.

The expectation from the eSignature solution was to increase the number of signed contracts with the distributors, boost company visibility, revenue, and brand image in the market.

Results

In the first year of deployment, the company signed contracts with 90,000 new distributors.

Results were mind-blowing:

- Improved registration experience for Independent Amway distributors

- Contract completion improved from weeks to seconds

- 50% reduction in administration

- Lowered distributor attrition during registration

The simple, intuitive process gives new independent Amway distributors a positive first impression and significantly reduces the number of potential distributors and prospects leaving the company.

Conclusion

eSignature is a valuable digital tool to boost customer experience and plays an undeniable part in the customer journey to transform a new customer into a qualified lead to generate a sale.

Our suggestion for businesses is to work on a dedicated customer experience strategy that will satisfy customers and turn them into advocates for your product.

At LunarPen, we help businesses build customer trust and loyalty using eSignature solutions.

SIGN UP for a FREE account to make eSignatures an integral part of your business strategy.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can digital customer experience be improved?

One can improve digital customer experience by following these steps:

  • Deep dive into the customer journey to gain insights
  • Observe and analyze customer behavior
  • Check user feedback through multiple channels
  • Gather important suggestions by the customers
  • Try to implement actionable suggestions
  • Focus on self-service to enhance customer experience
  • Take feedback from the customers after changes

How do you measure KPIs for customer experience?

It would be best if you used these KPIs to measure customer experience:

Net Promoter Score (NPS): It consists of two questions and gives only one customer experience-related number needed by the company to know the customer satisfaction level.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): It uses a scale from 1 to 5 to know customer satisfaction. 1 Star means the lowest, and 5 star means the highest.

Customer Effort Score (CES): It has different answers to judge customer experience starting from Very difficult, difficult, Neither, Easy, Very Easy.

Churn Rate: It shows the number of lost customers that have stopped using your product or services.

Retention Rate: It is a measurement of how a business retains customers over a period of time.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): It shows the total amount of money a customer would spend on a product or service during their lifetime.

How do clients sign contracts electronically?

You need to follow these easy steps on LunarPen App to sign contracts electronically:

  • Upload the document from a device or cloud storage
  • Add email ids if you want the signature of other people
  • Add eSignature text box, date, time, and further details in the document
  • eSign the document using a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or other devices
  • Email the document to the recipient

What are the four main areas of digital transformation?

A CEO should focus on these areas of digital transformation:

  • Employee Empowerment
  • Customer Engagement
  • IT infrastructure modernization
  • Innovation of products and services

Posted by Lunar Pen in eSignaure Law, 0 comments