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Businesses today realize they need updated processes to thrive. An easy processes change with high ROI is to supercharge the transition to paperless workplaces. With most companies transitioning to remote work and physical contact impossible, electronic signatures are filling an urgent need around the world. As time goes on, the transition to fully remote will only continue, and in a couple of years, paper will be a thing of the past—whether you do business in person, in office, or remotely.
According to the Government of Canada, an electronic signature is, “a signature that consists of one or more letters, characters, numbers or other symbols in digital form incorporated in, attached to or associated with an electronic document” (see the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, PIPEDA). Thanks to the various laws governing e-signatures and the vast array of compliance measures e-signature providers take, e-signatures are legally equivalent to traditional paper signatures, without all the ink and paper.
If you haven’t yet already, implementing electronic signatures will have enormous benefits for your business. Read on to learn about the eight reasons your company should switch to e-signatures this year.
1. Get things done faster
One of the biggest benefits of electronic signatures is increased speed. Printing out documents and waiting for handwritten signatures takes time, especially if people don’t work in the same office, the same building, the same city, or the same province! With paper signatures, it can take days or weeks to finalize your documents. With e-signatures, you might only need to wait minutes, or a few hours. In fact, our internal data shows that when sent electronically 80% of documents are signed within 24 hours.
2. Work more efficiently
With increased speed comes increased efficiency. When you implement e-signatures, workflows that used to be hard are suddenly simpler. Processes that took days now take minutes. The electronic signature portal tells you exactly what signatures are pending and follows up with signers automatically. E-signatures are the perfect example of working smarter, not harder.
3. Boost customer satisfaction
Customers appreciate faster, more efficient service. And these days, customers expect responsiveness. Why force a customer to come in to your office to sign something when they can do it on their phone from wherever they are instead? For some businesses, implementing e-signatures not only helps them boost customer satisfaction, it allows them to work with customers who are farther away, since distance is no longer an issue.
4. Make your employees happy
Overworked employees are unhappy employees. By streamlining their work and making their day-to-day easier, you will improve employee satisfaction exponentially. Not only that, providing tools to make their jobs easier shows employees you care, helping to improve retention over time.
5. Save money
Believe it or not, those handwritten signatures are costing you money. There are the hard costs related to paper, printers, toner, postage, and storage, plus the soft costs related to inefficiency, missed opportunities, lower customer and employee satisfaction, poor corporate image, and more. If you added all those costs up, you might be surprised how much paper signatures are costing you. Stay tuned for a customized eZsign ROI calculator to tell you just how much switching could save you!
6. Help the environment
All of the paper you’re using has a huge environmental impact. Paper mills use a ton of natural resources, as does printing and mailing documents. In contrast, electronic document management eliminates the need for paper and helps us save trees! If you want to make your office greener this year, e-signatures are a great way to start.
7. Free up office space
By getting rid of all that paper, imagine how much less clutter your office will have! You can say goodbye to your filing cabinets and convert that space into something your employees will enjoy, or even move to a smaller office and save on your lease.
8. Tighten your security
We often think of paper signatures as being the most secure, but just think how many people might forge another party’s signature on a paper document when no one is looking. eZsign boasts a variety of robust security features and multi-factor authentication to prove that the person who is signing is exactly who they say they are, and the signing evidence provides a thorough record of exactly who opened, viewed, clicked, and signed every single file.
This year, the choice is clear: e-signatures are a foolproof way to work smarter, not harder. If you haven’t made the switch to fully paperless workflows, contact us today. We can provide the right tools to get your electronic signing workflow up and running today, so you can take advantage of all the reasons to switch
