How retail businesses can take advantage of e-signature

The use of e-signatures continues to grow in popularity across many industries. While e-signature customer experience benefits are obvious in industries like real estate, finance, and law—in retail, it might, at first, be less clear how the technology can help. But organizations in the retail industry are increasingly using the power of e-signatures as part of their processes.

There are plenty of opportunities to deliver more value and optimize the customer experience with the capabilities that e-signatures offer. Here, we discuss some of the most important.

Creating an agile workforce

Much like agriculture and hospitality, retail is an industry that relies on an agile workforce.

From short-term employment to temporary and contract-based work, retail businesses often need to hire quickly and at short notice. This is particularly vital over periods of high seasonal demand.

Consider, for example, a large clothing store over the Christmas holidays. They need work to sustain the high seasonal demand, and the nature of the temporary work industry means it’s difficult to arrange this far in advance. For that reason, the employment or contracting process must be as quick as possible, from advertising the job to onboarding.

e-signatures eliminate one of the most significant onboarding bottlenecks: signing a contract. By accelerating employee and contractor onboarding, businesses can reduce short-staffing and better react to business requirements.

Ultimately, this allows retailers to better tailor the available staff to the seasonal demand, offering a higher level of customer service and avoiding wasted expenses.

Accelerated supply chains

In a globalized world, retail businesses rely on fast and reliable turnaround of supply chain processes. Your average supermarket, for example, needs to maintain fresh, high-quality produce. Therefore, they need to minimize the amount of time produce takes to travel from the field or dairy to the aisle. A reliable, agile supply chain is a vital part of enabling this.

In large companies, however, it’s important to make sure individual requisitions are signed off by the right people to maintain established company supply chains and approved vendors. Though important, this makes agility in supply chains difficult to achieve. e-signatures reduce this problem, by making requisitions and approvals faster and more efficient to process than ever, as well as allowing fast sign-off on supplier contracts.

Ultimately, providing quality products requires efficient and agile supply chains, which in turn allows businesses to improve their offerings and provide tangible value to the customer experience.

Creating instant sales

Retailers like car dealerships have to tackle complex logistical and regulatory challenges, in the timeframe of a single, one-time transaction. In this way, they’re much like real estate and finance industries, though without the luxury of time. They must ensure sales contracts and relevant documentation can be quickly processed without compromising the speed and agility of an instant transaction.

e-signatures can enable this by allowing relevant documentation to be quickly processed. If the customer decides to buy a car, the relevant forms can be sent and signed on the spot. This eliminates the time spent wading through inefficient paper processing and allows them to drive away as soon as possible after the purchase.

e-signature customer experience benefits for your business

There are many different e-signature tools available on the market. But there’s only one that provides the best opportunity for retail businesses who want to fundamentally improve their processes.

Nintex Sign® powered by Adobe Sign is a brand-new native Nintex tool which allows users to integrate e-signatures into their wider automated workflow processes. For businesses that already automate onboarding, supply chain management, and sales contract processes, Nintex Sign® is the best way of embedding e-signatures within existing workflows. From there, they can greatly increase the efficiency of their existing automated processes.

Nintex Sign® provides a superior level of service over third party e-signature plug-ins. Users can manage both their workflows and e-signatures as part of the same subscription, reducing the need to negotiate between multiple vendors.

Nintex Sign® is:

• The Microsoft preferred e-signature tool, allowing better integration with the wider Microsoft environment.
• Globally respected and trusted technology powered by Adobe Enterprise.
• The best-in-class enterprise service and support available from an e-signature vendor.

With Nintex, it’s not just about signatures. e-signatures are just one part of a wider strategy to digitize and automate inefficient digital processes. By combining workflow and e-signature capabilities, retail companies can optimize every stage of their business processes.

 

If you want to find out more about how Nintex Workflow and Nintex Sign® can help your business, get in touch with the Nintex team today.