Why the benefits of eSignature technology are now a must-have

In recent years, organizations all over the world have started using eSignatures across a range of everyday business documents. They have realized that a digitized, paperless signature function has considerable advantages, including great gains in efficiency. But at this point in time, harnessing the benefits of eSignature technology has gone beyond being just desirable to now being essential. We will explain why.

The working landscape has changed drastically

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic caused a global boom in remote working, employees and employers were already exploring the “work anywhere” possibilities that technology enables. eSignatures provided the paperless, frictionless flexibility that shifts from valuable to vital when working from home moved from optional to essential.

During this tricky period, deploying eSignature technology helped organizations to:

• Maintain business continuity by untying processes from paper
• Streamline approval processes that involved multiple stakeholders
• Transmit documents digitally instead of resorting to slower “snail mail”

Now, the world is making another transition – this time to a hybrid workplace model that caters equally to both remote and on-site work. In this era, where we can all recognize the benefits of eSignature technology, as they are now a firm fixture of the working landscape. Organizations who haven’t yet adopted the technology risk becoming obsolete.

Helping organizations to succeed with hybrid working

Today, many teams are composed of both remote and on-premises employees, working together across different sites and geographies. That means it’s now imperative to get your eSignature tool firing on all cylinders.

More on that, eSignature technology has a vital role to play in ensuring all participants in signature/document-related processes can easily and successfully play their parts. When documents can be signed and exchanged digitally by anyone, wherever they are, businesses who facilitate this have a significant edge over competitors who are still doing things the manual, paper-based way.

Streamlining and digitizing tasks end-to-end

However, we’ve only just scratched the surface. The deeper benefits of eSignature technology can only be unlocked when it is combined with process automation.

Process automation allows organizations to digitize entire business processes as “workflows”. These workflows can be accessed anywhere via the cloud, as a set of steps to be clicked through, which provide employees with guidance and prompts to ensure everything is done properly and in a timely fashion.

You can embed all kinds of vital apps and services in your workflows – and eSignature capabilities can be integrated too. For instance, let’s say you create a workflow dealing with how contracts are drafted, approved, and signed. Here’s what might happen:

• Document generation software drafts a contract using your data and templates
• Workflow routes the new contract to Stakeholder A for review and approval
• Stakeholder A reviews the contract, clicks “Approve”, and it’s routed to Stakeholder B
• Stakeholder B is prompted to provide their eSignature on the approved document
• The signed contract is then automatically sent to Stakeholder C, the final signatory

The Power of Process®

With process automation, there are no holdups while each participant waits to receive the contract. You no longer have to worry about stakeholders forgetting to forward the document to the next person in the chain. The entire process is expedited by the workflow.

Organizations who have started implementing eSignatures already have the advantage over those still lagging behind. But those who are combining the technology with workflows have an even greater edge. In a highly competitive world, it’s better to be among them.

Better experiences for everyone involved

When signature processes are streamlined and enhanced in this way, it’s better for everyone:

• Customers access their services and goods faster
• Less paper is used – better environmentally and economically
• Organizations get paid quicker and improve cashflow
• Employees waste less time and energy on paperwork and administration

As well as improving your bottom line, eSignatures provide the kinds of experiences that make an organization better for employees to work for, and better for customers and partners to work with. It’s one of the benefits of eSignature technology that can make a huge and noticeable difference.

Seizing the full benefits of eSignature technology

At Nintex, we want to help organizations start gaining all the benefits of eSignature technology without delay. With our platform, you can combine eSignatures with process automation, document generation, and other powerful technologies, to digitize and transform processes across your business.

We believe organizations today have no time to lose when it comes to adopting these technologies – but everything to gain. All the signs are pointing to eSignatures becoming more prevalent and valuable in the future.

If you’d like to discuss how Nintex can help you gain maximum benefit from deploying eSignature technology, get in touch with us today.