Posted on Tue, May 15, 2012
This morning we announced our new wizard through our press release, New Real Estate Professional-Friendly Features to Accelerate the Rapid Growth of SIGNiX-Powered zipLogix Digital Ink Electronic Signature Solution. The wizard will make it easier on real estate professionals sending out documents to clients to be signed. This announcement comes at just right time so we can show off the new wizard at the National Association of REALTORS® Midyear Meetings & Trade Expo. If you happen to be at the Expo, stop by booth #705 to see us.
We can't wait to show the rest of our partners and customers the new wizard, and if you're not familiar with SIGNiX, sign up for a free live demo by clicking the button below!
Posted on Fri, May 11, 2012
Next week is a traveling week for us! Several of our guys will be in Washington D.C. at the National Association of REALTORS® Midyear Meetings & Trade Expo on May 16th and 17th. If you're a realtor going to the expo, please stop by and say hi! The SIGNiX booth is #705 in the Exhibition Hall. We always have a great time at these conferences because A.) realtors are a fun group of people (can we get an amen!?) and B.) it's always nice to see our friends at zipLogix. zipLogix offers zipForm, the exclusive and official forms software of the National Assocation of REALTORS®, and our digital signatures are the backbone of their product Digital Ink! So if you stop by to see us, you should also take a trip over to zipLogix's booth to check them out too. They will be at booth #1801.
We will be at another conference next week, but this one is not too far... it's across the street at the Chattanooga Convention Center! We'll be at booth #321 at the Tennessee Credit Union League's annual convention and expo on May 17th. We are excited to meet this group of folks. It will be our first time at their convention and they were generous enough to host it next door to us. Aren't they sweet, we already love the Tennessee Credit Union Leaguers!
Have a happy Friday and we look forward to seeing you at all these tradeshows!
Posted on Tue, May 08, 2012
In our series on Digital Signature ROI, we’ve been exploring how electronic signature solutions can lower costs, increase efficiency, and create more productive employees.
In the next few posts, we’re going to show you the money… that is, we’ll talk about why electronic signatures can substantially improve how quickly your company gets paid for its services.
When we send paper contracts to be wet ink signed, we are relying on expectations that a signer will be present at a specific address to sit down at a desk, open an envelope, pull out a pen, complete your documents, and then turn around, find an envelope and return them back. Even with emailed electronic documents or faxes, we still expect a signer to be around a printer or fax machine.
The challenge is that signers are mobile these days. The concept of a physical desk that you sit at every morning is rapidly fleeting as we deploy technologies that allow individuals to be incredibly productive wherever they might be. Users these days expect technology that can allow them 24/7 access to email, networks, documents, and workflows.
The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) published a survey asking companies what types of employees are typically asked to sign documents:
That chart clearly shows a majority of documents need to be signed off by highly mobile senior executives, alongside a variety of other signers, all of whom are increasingly mobile.
An electronic signature system like SIGNiX can be accessed by anyone, on any device, at anytime, anywhere. Digital signature solutions provide a way for signers to review documents, acknowledge receipt, approve terms and sign off no matter their location or mobility. International clients can sign off on contracts just as quickly as their domestic colleagues. The customer who always lost contracts in the mailroom or was never at their desk can now sign from poolside… on vacation!
All of this means you can close that deal or finish that sale in a much shorter period of time since you’re not waiting on someone to get back to their office. You’re also providing better customer service by making it substantially easier to do business with your company. Customers won’t complain about the delay in their order due to a missing signature, and they may in fact choose your company over others because they simply prefer the speedier turnaround and minimal fuss involved in getting a contract signed.
Top analyst firm Forrester noted, with electronic signatures, “financial services firms and insurance companies report average contract cycle times falling from one or two weeks to a matter of days — or hours." [my emphasis]
Better customer service combined with faster revenue matched with competitive advantage? Sign me up!
Take a look at a FREE video showing a demonstration of digital signatures at work.
Posted on Thu, May 03, 2012
The
US ESIGN Act, signed in 2000, defines an electronic signature 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.”
This is great from a legal and technological perspective, but the real definition of an electronic signature should read:
“…a tool designed to more securely replace wet ink signatures that radically speeds up business processes, destroys inefficiency, lowers costs, and makes for more productive employees.”
That latter piece—making employees more productive with digital signatures—is what we’re going to throw a few details behind in this next segment of our Digital Signature ROI blog series.
Let’s think about how employee productivity is affected in a typical business that’s built on wet ink signed documents. Relying on these signatures to close business means that you must have staff dedicated to keeping the paper flowing smoothly. Companies risk customer flight if they can’t keep these processes under control. This means personnel hired for:
- Sending documents out;
- Keeping track of who was sent what when;
- Chasing down lagging signers;
- Resending documents to folks that misplaced documents / never received them;
- Opening envelopes when documents are returned;
- Looking at the documents to be sure all the signature and initial fields are filled out, let alone checking that all the other required information has been filled in;
- Assigning document ID numbers to paperwork;
- Filing the paperwork and/or scanning in the paper documents into a document repository or archive; and (breathe)
- Re-keying information from a signed paper form back into an electronic system!
The proliferation of electronic forms and documents has eliminated some of the problems above. However, the promise of straight-through processing (STP)—in other words, a fully electronic, end-to-end solution—is incomplete without electronic signatures. A majority of forms today are easily filled in on a computer, but then are printed out in order to be signed with a pen. These documents then need to be re-scanned and emailed, faxed, or sent via snail mail back to the company they originated from. And at that point, employees again have to take up the slack: confirming signatures, scanning barcodes, and rescanning documents back into an electronic system. It’s such a waste!
Compounding this are organizations where order and sales staff collect signed paper contracts and forms and send them in bulk at the end of the week to a central office, maximizing the pressure on the receiving end and further reducing productivity.
Deploying electronic signatures into your organization means that you can get signed documents from the customer immediately, and move to real straight-through processing. Surely, you can’t eliminate paper completely, as legally you must provide an option for clients to opt out of electronic signatures, but deploying digital signatures means that a majority of the employees dedicated to paper processing are suddenly freed up.
Why? Electronic signature solutions like SIGNiX take on all of the tasks typically performed by these masses of employees by allowing companies to...
- send out and route documents for signature to multiple parties;
- govern who signs what and when;
- see at any time where documents are in the signing process;
- send out reminders to signers who aren’t signing in a timely fashion;
- authenticate signers’ identities at signature (a step sometimes skipped in the paper world);
- ensure that signers are signing and completing mandatory fields; and
- collect electronic copies of forms that can be input directly back into a company’s systems of record, eliminating re-keying requirements;
…all via an online, SaaS model. No specialized personnel, no hardware, no software to install, and no infrastructure to maintain.
Companies can then re-deploy full-time employees devoted to these tasks into more productive roles or allow employees to focus on the critical aspects of their work (i.e. keeping track of specific contract requirements) rather than just moving paper. In fact, some organizations actually hire temporary staff simply to handle influxes of paper at peak times of the year when forms are returned. Electronic signatures can eliminate the need to hire these additional workers and make for a better use of hard-earned profits.
Often, the sales department takes on the responsibility for calling and bugging clients to check their inboxes and mailrooms for contracts to sign. Relying on electronic signature systems means that your salespeople can spend more time in the field crafting and developing relationships, becoming more revenue productive in the process.
When you consider businesses in the investment, realty, or insurance industries where forms move through a complex, multi-step process of reviews, approvals and signatures before transactions are finally set in motion, the productivity and efficiency gains won through electronic signature systems are multiplied several times.
While traditional electronic signature ROI tends to focus on eliminating overnight deliveries, all of these productivity gains also result in a substantial return on investment for the implementing organization.
Digital signature solutions like SIGNiX provide your company with the ability to unlock untold efficiency gains and enable you to foster a more productive workforce. In our next entry for the Digital Signature ROI series, we’ll talk about how electronic signatures can reduce drag on your revenues.
Posted on Tue, May 01, 2012
In our Digital Signature ROI series, we’ve been describing all of the dramatic ways digital signatures can change the nature of your business and deliver amazing returns. For the next few entries, we're going to talk about the efficiencies, time savings and other process improvements that can be gained with electronic signatures. (Check out the first post here.)
For decades, we’ve been promised the paperless office and all the dramatic changes that the lack of paper would produce - no filing cabinets, no folders, no overflowing mailboxes, and no overnight mail. Word processors, then computers, then the internet, and now mobile devices all were supposed to have made our lives simpler by allowing us to generate and review documents on a screen as opposed to on paper.
Forty-five years ago, Jim Henson (yeah, the Muppets guy…may he rest in peace) was hired to create a film entitled the “Paperwork Explosion,” promoting IBM’s early word processing and dictation systems. Check out the trippy, experimental video below.
So what happened? More than four decades ago, countless folks in this video said (in disturbingly repetitive fashion): “There’s more paper than ever. There always seemed to be enough time and people to do the paperwork.”
Yet even today, there’s more paper than ever! The Minnesota Office of Environmental Assistance reported that the average office worker uses over 10,000 pieces of copy paper each year, and that the costs of using paper in the office are up to 31 times higher than the cost of just purchasing the paper!
But you’re saying, “Hey, that’s why we purchased a contract management system and subscribe to that online forms service.” And yes, you’re likely more efficient than you were when all of those documents were manually generated, copied, and handled.
However, just because you’re generating electronic documents, and are having users fill out electronic forms on the web, it doesn’t mean you’ve hit the pinnacle of efficiency. Why? Because you still need signatures! Signatures and approvals are an essential part of modern business. In fact, businesses report that a majority of their processes require signatures.
The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) surveyed businesses regarding their signature practices and found that more than half of the printed documents used in a process were printed solely because of a requirement for a wet ink signature. In addition, they found that each signed document was accompanied by another 3-4 copies. That’s a lot of paper and a ton of inefficiency.
And then those signed paper documents, in multiple copies, have to find their way to other people to sign. And on, and on.
So we’ve clearly defined the problem. We can’t deliver on the promise of the paperless office until we account for one of the main causes of all the paper moving throughout our offices – wet ink signatures.
In the next few posts, we’ll look at how using electronic signatures can create more productive employees and workflows and how electronic signatures can reduce drag on your revenues.
Posted on Fri, Apr 27, 2012
We want to touch on the second half of the TechLeaders 2012 article we posted about on Tuesday, Making Work Flow with E-Signatures: Benefits and Challenges.
Can you believe that it can take days or even weeks to complete a paper-based sales process?! We certainly have seen it over and over again. The table below that the article listed out is something we see a lot in companies and we strive to destroy this long, terrible process by introducing digital signatures into their sales processes.
| |
Step |
Time |
| 1 |
Agent obtains set of forms to complete. |
15 min |
| 2 |
Agent partially completes forms. |
30 min |
| 3 |
Agent sends forms to client to finish and sign. |
15 min to 48 hours |
| 4 |
Client reviews and sends forms back to agent. |
2 to 10 days |
| 5 |
Agent reviews and then submits order for approval. |
30 min to 2 days |
| 6 |
Manager rejects (go back to step 1) or submits to Operations. |
30 min to 2 days |
| 7 |
Operations rejects (go back to step 2) or approves order. |
30 min to 2 days |
| 8 |
Order is filled (e.g. account opened, product shipped, etc.). |
30 min to 2 days |
TOTAL: Days or weeks!
We see companies sales cycle go from days to minutes. With SIGNiX, the agent uploads the forms to MyDoX online, inserts signature lines for the client and cc's anyone who needs to see the signed document, and sends to the client. The client signs online and everyone is notified by an email that the document is finished. Pretty easy, right?!
Check out our video demo that shows the client signing a document. Click the button below.
Posted on Tue, Apr 24, 2012
Let's talk about another article from the TechLeaders 2012 article archive. This article is titled, Making Work Flow with E-Signatures: Benefits and Challenges, and provides a great overview of what it takes to integrate e-signatures into your sales process along with some astonishing results if done well. Let's take a look at some of those results listed in the article:
- 95% reduction in errors
- 50 to 90% real-dollar savings
- Increased customer acceptance of contracts
- Faster receipt of revenue and delivery of services
- Reduced labor, shipping, processing and handling costs
- More time for sales agents to focus on selling
- Improved client perception
Looks like a lot of good reasons to adopt digital signatures into your workflow processes! We think these results definitely dip their toe in The Digital Signature ROI.
The rest of the article spells out some challenges associated with e-signature integration as well as some more crazy facts if you're still using paper in your sales process. What has been your experience when signing with paper and pen when closing a sale? Or, if you use e-signatures, do you agree with the benefits listed in the article? Do these statistics shock you? We'd love to hear what you think!
Posted on Fri, Apr 20, 2012
We are honored to have amongst our ranks now, John Harris, SIGNiX Director of Product Management! John will be invaluable to our company as he combines his vast experience with electronic signatures and our digital signature solution. We're excited to see what happens over these next months and how our company can grow with John's expertise.
If you would like to see the press release and learn more about John, click here: Electronic Signature Industry Veteran John Harris Joins SIGNiX.
We wish you all a happy Friday from the SIGNiX office! Enjoy your weekend!
Posted on Thu, Apr 12, 2012
We caught wind of electronic signatures making headlines locally in our Chattanooga newspaper, the Chattanooga Times Free Press. A Chattanooga man was caught scraping an image of an electronic signature from a federal judge to attempt to be released from jail early. You can read the article for yourself HERE on the Chattanooga Times Free Press' website.
This is exactly what we warn against in our Apples to Oranges: Digital Signatures vs. Electronic Signatures white paper. Electronic signatures do not have the security of a digital signature. A digital signature is embedded within the document and cannot be forged. If the document had been sent electronically from the man trying to forge the judge's e-signature, a notification would have automatically popped up when opened by Adobe Reader giving the receiver of the document a heads-up that the document had been tampered with.
Want to read our Apples to Oranges white paper to learn more? Click the button below to get your personal copy.
Posted on Tue, Apr 10, 2012
Let's begin the Digital Signature ROI series with a post about cutting costs.
The earliest adopters of electronic signature technology were probably most focused on the straightforward and obvious savings in direct, out of pocket costs. It was easy to calculate some of these costs for paper, both originals and copies, as well as delivery costs ranging from internal or U.S. mail to overnight delivery and couriers. The addition of storage costs, both long term and short term, for originals as well as duplicates of more important documents, continued to make the business case more compelling for many industries and processes. In addition, tracking and destruction costs can be expensive but are sometimes overlooked. Simply adding up these hard costs that could be eliminated with an investment in e-signature technology made it a very compelling business case for many companies.
Let me share just a few somewhat surprising examples of the significant cost savings identified by various companies. Storing and managing paper records can cost 50 to 75 times as much as electronic records. Digitally signed documents can result in a reduction of at least 75% of document handling costs, shipping costs and loan processing costs. Scanning paper documents can eliminate some of the downstream costs, but the overall costs associated with scanning have been estimated at nearly $5 per page. Finally, the expenses associated with filling a standard filling cabinet have been estimated at more than $20,000 with another $2,000 each year to maintain those records.
These savings in hard costs made for a relatively simple cost benefit analysis, but they are only the tip of the iceberg relative to the many other savings in efficiency and the other benefits to be reviewed during this series.
If you're a more visual person, take a look at our video demo to see some of these costs added up...