I’ve been testing eSignature or eSign products from various SaaS vendors and my conclusion is that they are all missing the point.
The only exception is the one I’m currently using, which offers a lot of flexibility but costs 3x more.
Why broken?
Most of the products assume this workflow:
- Company prepares the document to be signed
- Company sends an email with a link to the signature page
- Customer opens the email and clicks the link
- Customer opens the page and signs the document
- SaaS sends final copies of signed documents to both parties
- SaaS updates status of document as signed
Let’s break this down now.
Step 1 is slow because the company needs some customer PII added to the document. If it’s a new customer, there might be initial friction to collect that data and transport it into the document.
Step 2 relies on email in a moment in time where humanity faces a huge issue with spam. There are big chances the transactional email will be caught and false flagged by spam filters. In addition to that, many people are not using email at all these days.
Step 3 involves clicking links which is now demonized by lots of groups, especially between elderly people who were advised by young ones not to click on anything because bad things can happen behind the scenes.
Steps 5 and 6 are good to have, but not ideal.
The ideal approach
Here is the flow that I have implemented and adjusted over time to get to a low friction, low issue, low headache process.
- Company prepares document to be signed with only service/product data. The only customer data added at this point is a phone number.
- Customer receives a link via a verified WhatsApp account.
- Customer clicks the links as he/she trusts the verified badge
- Customer provides PII via a web form
- SaaS finally builds the document for signature with data collected in steps 1 and 4
- Customer receives link via WhatsApp to another page with the built document and the sign button. Customer reviews the document and signs it.
- SaaS updates records, uploads a copy of the signed document to an external service (G Drive, Dropbox, S3 etc.), sends a final link to the customer via WhatsApp through which he/she can open the PDF and eventually download/email/share it.
In summary:
- Each party informs its own data
- IM is used instead of email
- Final signed document can be accessed and shared at user’s convenience
Conclusion
None of the eSignature products I’ve been testing lately allows me to implement above steps 1 to 7.
All of them fall short in at least one step.