With a lot of wasted time and increased costs on unnecessary paperwork, signing a contract has for a long time been a cumbersome process. But it doesn’t have to be like that! Thanks in part to EUs E-Sign Act and the its directive on electronic signatures, digital signatures were allowed as legally binding alternatives to handwritten signatures as early as twenty years ago. More companies are today taking advantage of the opportunity to offer electronic signatures (also commonly called esign), making it easy for their customers to sign agreements directly from their mobile phone or a computer.
E-signatures do not only increase your competitiveness by saving you money, time and energy, but also offer you an environmentally friendly alternative to paper documentation. In other words, using e-signatures comes with a lot of benefits that might not always be clear when thinking about it.
Do you want to know more about how you can use e-signatures in Lime CRM?
Digital signatures makes it easy
One of the biggest advantages of signing an agreement or contract electronically is that it’s easy. Arranging a meeting in order to sign a document, or wait for a contract to arrive in the mail just to sign it and send it back? These are now just memories! By using digital signatures you can sign your contract directly from your computer or mobile phone instead, so it doesn’t matter whether you’re sitting on the beach in the Bahamas or waiting for the bus. If more than one person needs to sign that isn’t a problem either, since everyone can do it from different places using their electronic device.
Using e-signatures saves time, money and energy
With e-signatures, you don’t have to do the process of posting, scanning and saving contracts into different archives. It’s possible to sign an agreement and instantly be done with the entire process. No longer do you need to spend hours handling physical documents, instead you can handle the entire contract process in just a few minutes. A study from Forrester Consulting shows that e-signatures speed up the signing process up to 21 times compared to traditional signing. What could it mean for your business? Applied to all sales processes throughout an entire year, it quickly becomes quite a lot of time saved. Costs for printing, postage and administration are all avoided. Lime eSign was especially developed to be as simple as possible and to integrate itself with Lime CRM in a seamless way, where the entire sales process, from document upload to communication and signing, is all managed directly in one place.
Increased contract security
Electronic signatures are more secure than traditional alternatives and makes it much more difficult for counterfeits to slip through the net. E-signing is often combined with an identification process that ensures that the right person signs the contract and the agreement isn’t at risk of being void. Having all your paperwork gathered in just one system prevents important documents from getting lost, which means you’ll have better control over what actually happens in your workflows.
Everyone likes a satisfied customer
Customers like it when a process is simple, professional and fast, and as a company it’s important to think about what experience your customers get when dealing with you. Using digital signatures makes everything easier for both parties. When companies can provide a frictionless experience during the signing process, it sends an important signal to the customer. The environmental benefits of a digital solution can’t be overemphasised either, as they might just give you that little edge over competitors in the eyes of today’s enlightened decision-makers. It’s no wonder more and more businesses are realising the benefits of electronic signatures.
Lime eSign is exactly what it sounds like – a digital way to seal your deals. Once you have integrated a signing feature in your CRM you can forget about documents going missing.