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Workforces have pivoted to remote business models, and consumers across all industries now expect convenient, at-home experiences as the new “anywhere economy” takes center stage. Change management initiatives have accelerated and driven organizations headlong into the process of radical digital transformation. Broad ranges of use cases for e-signatures in internal and external business processes can span B2E, B2B, and B2C workflows, greatly enhancing the experience for employees and customers.
For organizations that have already recognized the benefits of e-signatures across multiple lines of business, here is our 6-step process for leveraging your e-signature technology to scale across the entire enterprise. This represents a formal, repeatable process to help expand the use of e-signature software across the organization for enterprises, small businesses, and companies of all sizes. This approach can also serve as a useful framework for businesses that have not yet expanded e-signatures to other lines of business but expect to in the future.
Expansion Methodology: A 6-Step Process
1. Use Case Assessment
Map out all the possible use cases for e-signature within your organization. For this initial exercise, work with stakeholders from different corners of your organization to earmark the easiest use cases with the highest impact. ROI impact and implementation speed should be key parameters in the evaluation process.
A great B2C use case to consider is wealth management. The consumer-facing transactions linked to customer acquisition, growth, and retention initiatives have the potential for high ROI. Implementation speed is also high, with interactions of this nature usually being person-to-person and would not require integrations within existing systems to launch. Wealth managers can typically log right into OneSpan Sign and begin sending agreements immediately.
Example: B2C Wealth Management
- ROI impact: High
- Consumer-facing
- Aligned to ongoing customer acquisition efforts
- Implementation Speed: High
- User-initiated
- No integration required
- Considerations:
- Templates to accelerate document preparation
- Know your customer (KYC) compliance requirements
- How the signing will take place, e.g. remote or in-person
- White labeling, to keep your brand front and center
2. Approach New Business Groups
Once your priority use cases have been identified, it is now time to approach business units to understand their current processes, any pain points or issues within their workflows, and how e-signatures can benefit them. The key here is understanding any barriers to adoption or current challenges, which may explain why they haven’t yet considered e-signature. Sharing internal success stories or those of industry peers can also help evangelize the benefits and shed light on use cases that may not yet be live within your organization.
3. Qualification Checklist
Dive a bit deeper and document the specific requirements for each identified use case. Capturing this information up front is an important foundational step. Ask questions like:
- How will each transaction be initiated?
- What authentication method should be used to verify signers?
- Are signatures required from every recipient or are some optional?
- Which documents should be visible or hidden to certain participants during the signature process?
4. Demo Day
This is a great opportunity to pitch your case internally. Develop use case specific demos for influential stakeholders within your organization, including executive sponsors, business owners, and champions, as well as representatives from finance and legal and compliance. Features, such as the detailed audit trail, will be of great interest to these groups.
A typical demo day agenda should include an overview of your initial e-signature use case(s), your success outcomes, the rationale in targeting this specific line of business, and of course, next steps in the implementation process to maximize value and benefits.
5. Deployment Plan
This step is all about accountability. Ensure you keep the project on track and key milestones and deliverables are transparent to all stakeholders involved. Building a deployment plan for your e-signature initiative should always include the following components:
- project schedule
- project lifecycle, organized by phases
- key deliverables and milestones
- work breakdown, organized by required tasks to complete the project
The aim is to rinse and repeat. You should be able to replicate this process for future deployments in order to build and expand the use of e-signatures across your enterprise.
6. Internal Marketing
Evangelize what you’ve built. This will enable you to gain traction and momentum for future e-signature projects. Adoption typically takes off more quickly internally, so make use of tools like launch events, weekly usage reports, tutorials, and professional development activities for staff to help increase usage and drive the right set of behaviors for your customers. Make sure to highlight what’s driving the change and keep your teams engaged and informed.
Takeaways
When exploring your e-signature roll-out, think ahead to the goal of eventual enterprise-wide adoption. This is a best practice that will provide a level of uniformity and standardization to your plans. By building once and then scaling across multiple use cases, channels, and lines of business, you can increase efficiency, avoid siloed deployments, and greatly reducing the time required to digitize new use cases as they come online.
This webinar was part 3 in the series ”Building for the Future: E-Signatures Pave the Way for Digital Transformation”. Read
