Electronic signatures have gained significant popularity in today’s digital world. Most sectors of the economy are adapting to this technology for streamlining their business operations and optimizing their business process.
A number of countries around the globe are leaning towards the use of e-signature solutions to aid several businesses and organizations in performing documentation in less time and minimize the risk of losing data during the process.
If you are also someone who is looking for a way to grow your business using advanced technology such as e-signatures, fret not, we’ve got you covered.
In this article, we will be discussing everything you need to know about e-signatures and how the e-signature APIs can refine your workflow to attain maximum growth.
So, without further ado, let’s get to it!
1. What Are E-Signature APIs?
An electronic signature application program interface (E-Signature API) happens to be a representational state transfer web service that allows individuals to request signatures online in a secure way.
2. How Do E-Signature APIs Work?
E-Signature APIs tend to have endpoints that are used by the developers for making API calls. To begin using the service, the developer is required to have an API key, after which the API can be easily added to any website or application. These e-signature APIs usually use the GET and POST request methods for sending and receiving information, and the responses are returned in JSON format.
However, in case you’re concerned that your e-signature may be duplicated and used without your consent, don’t worry, that’s not possible as these signatures are encrypted.
3. Why Should a Business Use an App for Signing Documents?
Not only are APIs safe and speedy, but they also tend to be robust and development-friendly. Deploying e-signature solutions rapidly will enable businesses to deal with a considerable amount of paperwork regularly without going through much hassle. E-Signatures make the process easier for businesses by providing a safe and effortless method as opposed to a traditional method. This smooth documentation procedure in return leads to a happy customer base too. A happy clientele is what every business demands now, isn’t it?
4. The 4 Ways in Which E-Signature APIs Refine Your Workflow for Maximum Growth
When starting a business, it is often preferred to do things in the easiest way possible. The prime goal is making something work, not figuring out the best way for it. Frankly speaking, that’s the approach everyone should take. But what happens when the business grows? Don’t you think that those old ways would add friction to the processes, hence, slowing them down? Sadly, that’s exactly what happens in most cases. But it doesn’t have to be like this, does it?
One of the hurdles that cause significant friction and slow down the business processes is inefficient document management. Fortunately, e-signature APIs tend to be the fastest paths that can help eliminate this friction or reduce it by a significant margin.
Here is how the e-signature APIs help businesses to grow and enter a whole new digital realm.
5. Automatic Document Tracking
If you think that sending documents for signatures marks the end of the process, you’re wrong. You would have to wait for the signed documents to be returned as well.
People in the sales department often tend to walk on a tight rope between playing it cool and missing the quota or being too pushy and scaring off a prospect. HR teams also face a similar situation as it would be their last priority to upset a working relationship before the new hire begins working.
All this discomfort comes from the uncertainty of not knowing the reason why someone has not signed the document. Luckily, we live in a modern world where advanced e-signature solutions can take away this stress by doing the job for you.
Even if you’re not using the API, you would still get notified whenever the document is opened, signed, or returned. However, with APIs, you can take it to the next level as you can customize the action that your system performs based on the notification you get. For example, if the document was opened but not signed, you can create an automatic response to send a reminder to that person for signing the document. Isn’t it amazing how this automatic process can save you from the hassle of sending that follow-up?
What’s even better is that these tools also provide the automatic reminder feature, so if someone hasn’t signed, you won’t have to follow up, it will be taken care of by the API.
6. Streamlined Experience
E-Signature APIs can help you streamline the workflow to take your user experience to a whole new level by making the process faster and easier.
The e-signature technology fixes your problem of the slow signing of documents. By embedding e-signature tools using APIs, users can sign the documents directly on the app or website. This tends to eliminate all the distractions, hence, boosting the completion of documents by a significant 26%.
Reducing the number of steps of the process just happens to be a bit of the whole experience formula. With e-signature embedded with the help of APIs into your business websites or platforms, the dream of generating custom signature requests on your own application becomes a reality.
Along with that, when new hires and customers are provided with the facility to sign documents on your own website, it will save them from the hassle of logging in or making an account on any third-party app for the job. This will make your chances of converting them go way up, which will propel your business towards more remarkable growth, and it will also serve as a great branding technique as well.
7. Processing Documents into Productivity
If you’ve ever been a part of the Sales or HR team or you are familiar with how things work there, you must be aware that they manage documents at quite a large scale, and frequently, there is a lot of repetition as well. Filling out personal details manually on forms and documents is not only a dull job, but it also requires a lot of time as well.
However, e-signature tools can allow the teams to streamline the process by converting frequently used documents to digital templates. As a result, the time that was used up in preparing the same document again for signature can be utilized somewhere else. This approach is said to be perfect for high-volume documents that are to be sent to different recipients on a frequent basis.
Even though the idea of templates isn’t new, when the idea is combined with APIs, the process moves up a level and becomes a whole lot more effective. The e-signature APIs will allow you to merge the complete contact database and will fill out fields like names and addresses automatically in your templates.
What’s even better is that thousands of personalized contracts and documents can be sent using a single API call in a blink of an eye. Consequently, the Sales and HR teams of your business will spend more time finding the right clients and employees closing deals and less time shuffling papers around.
8. Speedy Process Coupled with Financial Advantages
To start off, the e-signature APIs minimize the costs incurred on paper, printing, and handling. Not only will you save the money spent on buying reams of paper, but you also won’t have to maintain a whole fleet of scanners and printers.
In addition to that, the use of e-signature APIs also means that you won’t require a huge staff for menial office tasks such as scanning, printing, emailing, signing, and storing company documents.
You must be thinking that it isn’t really necessary to have APIs to get the above-mentioned benefits, right? But let us tell you that APIs can up your game by making the process quite speedy. Generating and customizing responses is what can be achieved by APIs and it’s what helps you reduce your employees and save up big time as well!
9. Customer Satisfaction
By now, we’ve established that the use of e-signature APIs ensures a faster, safer, and easier documentation process coupled with a smooth signing experience. But does that benefit your business only?
This smooth and hassle-free experience adds to customer satisfaction and makes your customers feel positive about you. So, technically you will be killing two birds with one stone. That’s right when your customers are treated well and their time is valued, not only will they be happy, but it will also turn out to be beneficial for your business!
10. Is It Legal to Incorporate E-Signature APIs Into Your Business?
If not more, e-signatures do offer legal validity as traditional signatures. However, due to the proliferation of electronic signature solutions, a number of countries are beginning to introduce related legislation at a fast pace. While the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act was passed in the United States, the Electronic Identification, Authentication, and Trust Services (eIDAS) were established in the European Union.
Cutting to the chase, e-signatures are entirely valid and legal in the United States and are granted the same legal status as handwritten signatures as per the law of the state.
11. Conclusion
All in all, e-signatures are accessible easily by anyone in the market and are widely used as well. However, embedding API service with e-signatures for your business is an essential step to help it sustain itself in the highly competitive business world.
So, if you’re running a business for a while, or even if you’re just starting out, incorporating e-signatures into your business will surely take it to a whole new level by saving time and making the process faster!
