Tracking a package and making sure it arrives on time can make all the difference in customer service. Just the other day, I ordered a few parts to get my motorcycle back in riding shape after I put it away for the winter. Nothing major, just an oil filter and some custom parts to make it a little more mine. After I submitted my order, I was emailed with date and time of arrival. A few days later, my package arrived followed by a simple yet effective customer service email making sure everything was OK.

That was great, but after I thought about it, they really had no idea when I changed my oil or if I needed any assistance with the installation of my air filter. And then I thought about it from a sales perspective; once a sales contract is delivered, do you, as a salesman, really know where the contract is?

Has it been reviewed?

Who has signed it?

Did they even take a look at it yet?

There are about a thousand possible scenarios that probably go running through anyone’s head. But what if you could track some of those more important actions? What if you could see who has reviewed the document or even signed the document in real time? What advantages do you think that would bring your sales team?  Imagine if they could call the next person in line or call after someone has reviewed the document to make sure they are still comfortable with all the terms and conditions.

With SmartSign that is a very real feature. Our system lets you set up automatic alerts based on important actions taken against your document. For example, if your Director of sales wants to know when a new client is brought on, you can designate an alert. Your account management team could also be alerted, helping you to get the ball rolling and improve customer service.

Tracking the arrival of a document is important, but think of all the possibilities and improvements your sales team and organization as a whole can make by knowing that much more.

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I just returned from The 2012 ESI Forum and ESA Leadership Summit in Irving, TX, which was a wonderful event on many different levels. The networking opportunities, meetings and sessions all contributed to make this a great way to kick off the New Year.  I attended this event with an open mind, my focus was to participate in meetings and sessions that reflect on what happened in the industry in 2011 and discover some of the key trends, and obstacles coming into 2012. Not to my surprise, there was a strong vibe on implementing new technology across the board.

My particular interest was centered around optimizing business process and workflows by implementing new technology. Some of the contributing factors for a need to utilize emerging technologies include:

• the growth of the competitive landscape in the electronic security industry
• the time consumed by inefficient processes for techs out in the field
• further demand for more personal and fast customer service
• equipping the sales/retention teams with the right tools to get the job done quicker and more intuitively.

Forefront in the technology discussions was the use of mobile applications and tablets- I’ll give the iPad a shout-out since it was most frequently discussed. Utilizing tablets (iPads) for techs in the field, or sales representatives to further streamline their processes. Removing the old paper trail by digitizing much of the documentation. As you could imagine, I was delighted to see that eContracting was mentioned during one of the sessions that I attended. Although I was happy to hear all of the excitement and ideas floating around the conference, now it’s time to actually execute on the ideas. I think 2012 is going to be a great year for eContracting in the industry, as further optimizing the customer contracting, installation, and on-boarding process is going to assist many alarm companies in recognizing their goals, and increasing their RMR.

With these ideas and more, I think the security alarm industry is poised to grow over the next few years. With many of these advancements, we are all merely scratching the surface of what’s to come.

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The path of electronic signatures and security alarm companies came to a head this past year. Both industries seemed to discover each other’s unique position, services and needs at the same time which led to a very interesting period of discovery. A few security alarm companies who were “early adopters” really set the tone and were able to see some great benefits and improvements from implementing electronic signatures.

Raising the level of comfort with new processes is always a bit of a challenge. It wasn’t smooth all the time, but after diligently working with funding sources, business and technical teams, we were able to help our clients put some really cool applications in place. So in turn I’d like to underscore two recent examples that led to some really awesome results.

Example 1: A leading company’s electronic adoption rate was held up due to major funding source only accepting 10% of documents to be signed electronically.

eO Assistance: Stepping in to assist our client with this particular funding source we helped to provide all information and access to vet our processes and system, they became extremely comfortable with the level of control SmarSign provides.

Result: They are now having over 50% of their contracts signed electronically and have plans to move toward a complete paperless process. This is not only helping them to increase revenues to become more profitable, but it is also saving them money on shipping, re-contracting, and storage costs.

Example 2: Paper contracts everywhere. Keeping track of all your paper documents is resource intensive. Referencing, finding, and filing all those docs cost employees valuable time.

eO Assistance: Paper-In is a process that allows you to convert signed paper documents to Electronic Originals that still keep their value. Also our Trusted Repository’s transaction management solutions allow you to search by date range, status, or a variety of other unique identifiers.

With all signs pointing to more companies implementing solutions in the cloud in 2012 to support company goals, it’s a sure fire bet that electronic signatures are going to play a major role.

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Keeping up with your outstanding orders and agreements is one of the key benefits of an electronic signature solution. Using the SmartSign Tracker feature allows our customers to rapidly identify sticking points in their business. The Tracker allows you to search by date range, status, or a variety of other unique identifiers. Search results are displayed by Transaction Identifier, Status, or Creation Date.

Once you’ve located the correct transaction, the Tracker allows you to drill down to see exactly where the transaction is in the workflow.

• The Tracker shows the status of each participant within the transaction.
• If you required a participant to go through additional identification screening – the Tracker shows a pass or fail indicator for each participant.
• If one of your signers is slowing down the process – quickly send a gentle reminder invitation to him.
• If the terms of the agreement have changed – the Tracker allows you to rescind the transaction or upload a new version of any document to the transaction and send out an updated invitation.
• What about those pesky customer support calls? Maybe your signer “misplaced” her security code – use the Tracker to look up the code for her.

As you can see, the Tracker helps keep all your deals “on track”.

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Access to up-to-date information is rapidly becoming the standard for users armed with the latest Smart Phone technology. Most of us have an “app” for getting the latest news, weather, sports scores, whatever we want to know when we want to know it. Business users are no different, in fact for those of us that travel a lot or have the benefit of working remotely, access to information we need to get the job done is critical. And a big part of getting the job done often involves getting signatures on documents from your customers, partners, or employees. Whether it is a new contract, a mutual non-disclosure, a real estate agreement or a beneficiary form – having the ability to track where it is in the process is crucial to your business.

With the latest version of eOriginal Command Center we enable you to satisfy your need for “information when I want it, where I want it.” Command Center automatically detects when you are on a mobile device and adapts the user experience to the capabilities of the device. Once you have logged into the application, you can quickly search for outstanding transactions by date sent, status or both. The results are displayed back in seconds and allow you to drill down to see all the details about the transaction. Is one of your deals “stuck” waiting on someone to sign a contract? Simply send out an email reminder to the customer, or all participants, right from your phone. So now, wherever you are you can keep up with your business and keep information moving as fast as you are!

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I often speak with security alarm companies on the benefits of eOrignal’s SmartSign- electronic signature solutions. You may or may not be surprised by the various departments, processes and workflows where SmartSigning has proven to be beneficial in the Alarm industry; including contracting new clients through inside and outside sales, HR/ employee onboarding, and customer retention/ renewals, just to name a few.

One particular area that I have found to require a large amount of company resources and focus has been client retention and customer renewals. Which in most cases bring with it a cumbersome paper process, customer inconvenience and unfortunately customer drop off. How you re-contract today will have direct influence on your companies RMR tomorrow- whether it be negative or positive; of course the goal would be the later.

As old contracts begin to expire, eOriginal’s SmartSign provides Alarm companies the advantage of re-contracting with only the click of a button. Most importantly, it provides a faster, friendlier and more convenient customer experience. Some of the immediate benefits include,

• Increased employee productivity- now sales and retention departments can complete these tasks in half the time.

• Decreased mailing, paper, shipping, and postage cost

• Improved customer experience and relations

• Ability to have same day, even same hour client renewals

How this works:

eOriginal can tie into your existing CRM; with the click of a button we will automatically pull client information from your CRM, add it to the new contract in the appropriate fields, and send your customer an invitation to sign. Your customer then is guided through an easy and intuitive eSigning contract renewal process by eOriginal’s SmartSign.

You can see how this process works by going to eOriginal’s Security Alarm demonstration page by clicking here.

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For those customers who have taken the time to tryout our our new version on Preview On Demand, you have probably already experienced the new Workspace. Yes, we did it. We merged the SmartSign Web and Command Center user interfaces into a single application. The “new” Command Center user interface has undergone a significant update, making it much easier for you to locate, manage, and interact with your transactions and documents.

But our engineers were not just satisfied with a simple user interface refresh, they spent a lot of time “under the hood” optimizing the way you can search for documents and transaction, implementing (geek alert) Ajax to enable you to quickly page through large result sets, reorder lists, change the order of table rows in results, and introduced the new Snapshot view. The Snapshot “shows itself” anytime you click on a transaction, giving you a fast-yet-comprehensive view of the transaction. From the Snapshot, you can…

• View all the documents associated with the transaction,
• View the document histories on each document,
• Retrieve a copy of a document,
• Retrieve a Document Activity History Report (PDF),
• and much more…try it out

But one of my favorite features of the new Workspace is Collections. There are two types of collections; transaction and document. To create a collection, simply click Add from the Collections list on the left side of the page. Type in the name of your collection and a new collection is added to your list. Now all you have to do is search for transactions (or documents) using the search feature at the top of the page. Click on the transactions you want and drag them over to the collection. The selected transactions are automatically added as members of the collection.

Once you have created a collection, you can perform all kinds of batch actions on its members. Maybe you need to delete obsolete or incomplete transactions, or transfer control to a partner, or destroy signed Electronic Originals that have passed their retention period. All these actions (and more) are available to you by clicking on the little arrow to the right of the collection name. Of course, all available actions are limited to your permissions in the trusted repository.

So go ahead, log into Preview and create a collection.

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I was recently talking with one of our business development executives and he was telling me about a potential client who wanted us to break down the document management and storage costs within our Trusted Repository after a document was eSigned with SmartSign. Well, we went over the general costs and variables including transaction volumes/number documents, their relative size, and their value.

The above three “variables” are not the only things to take into consideration, but for this particular opportunity, it is what is most important to them.

• The transaction volume accounts for how many transactions a company will be completing over a given time period. Will the company be signing 100 docs per day/month/year, you get the point…
• Relative size really means how big your documents are or packages 35KB, a few mgs, or larger.
• The value of the documents translates into, will the documents you are having eSigned have any negotiable/monetary value.

This last point is extremely important – improper storage and management can and will compromise their value.

OK, back to our business development guy and his opportunity. This particular opportunity had some fairly complex and large documents, somewhere around 250kbs, with a high transaction volume, and the docs would be leveraged as collateral. After taking into account all variables, we figured the approximate costs would roughly equal $0.0038 per transaction per month (under ½ cent).

If you are interested in learning more, I would first like you to take a look at what it costs you to physically store and manage your documents. You’ll need to take into account storage space, costs per file cabinet, even administrative costs, among other things. We went over what it costs to have documents signed in a previous post and it may help.

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Recently SDM Magazine published a great article “ESIGN and Go (& Grow Your Business)” on what electronic signatures can do for your security alarm business. The article features some great insight from industry leaders including NorthStar Alarm Services, a client of eOriginal’s.

Electronic signatures can really make an impact on productivity. In the article Nick Nelson, an inside sales agent and customer retention specialist at NorthStar, notes “I personally can do five to ten of these every day rather than handwriting out and mailing each one”.  He says “It cuts my time at least in half and allows me to work with other customers or take phone calls. When it comes back, it notifies me it’s been done. They’re then forwarded on to billing, tech support, service technicians, etc.”

Although the front-end productivity benefits are apparent and relevant, the back-end benefits of eOriginal’s system frequently prove to be just as important and, in many cases, even more so.  eOriginal’s SmartSign not only protects the value of your eSigned agreements, it improves your control of contracts, allows your company to utilize these electronic assets as collateral in an automated, secure environment, increasing your lenders’ comfortability.  SmartSign also improves back-office processes by removing the need to manually scan, file and search for paper documents.

To view the entire article, please follow the link above.  SDM Magazine is filled with great resources and will benefit any security alarm professional.

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Electronic signatures have many benefits in assisting companies improve their contract signing and workflow processes. From an ROI perspective, one of the most important features is speeding time to money – that is speeding the process by which a customer may securely receive, review, sign and return a set of documents in order to complete a transaction.

It’s been proven that removing paper from business processes has saved a lot of money over traditional costs associated with physically printing, shipping, filing, scanning and manual data entry.  This not only has saved companies money and resources on administrative costs, but has also shortened a company’s Quote to Cash Process, and allowed the electronic signature solution to pay for itself quickly.

But what happens when your documents aren’t signed right away? Is SmartSign still of value?  Is it possible for SmartSign to also be used to improve your internal business processes, help ensure better customer service, and provide your company with tools to manage and monitor change?  You may be surprised to find that the answer is yes.

Better management starts with better insight.  Executives and management are provided visibility over the entire signing process, so you’ll always know where a document is in the workflow process.  As an example, let’s assume that an agreement needs to be signed and or reviewed by 5 people (Sales Rep., Mr. Signer, Mrs. Signer, Department Manager and Service Manager).  If this was a paper process, it would be very difficult for you to accurately track and monitor who had or had not signed the agreement, and on whose desk it currently sits.  In a paper world, when asked for a status update, the sales executive would typically answer “I’m trying to track it down; I’ve left multiple voice mail messages with everyone associated with this transaction and have not heard back from anyone yet.”

Sound familiar?  What a frustrating waste of time and energy!  With eOriginal SmartSign Web®, the system provides complete visibility to the entire signing experience.  Reps know the status of agreements, and management has an accurate view over all transactions that are in-process or completed.

Automated notifications can be set up in SmartSign to proactively alert pertinent parties of significant events in the transaction process.  Examples of notification events can include your customer logging into the SmartSign signing room, signer number 3 of 5 completing the signing process or that a transaction is fully reviewed and signed by all parties.  In addition, how much better would your team’s closing rate improve if they knew when a prospect enters a signing room by a real time notification?  With this information, a rep may choose to call and assure a completed transaction.

Expirations and reminders may also be set to assure deadlines will be met.  From a Sales perspective, the rep now does not need to spend time worrying about remembering to remind someone of a deadline. Reminders would also let customers know how long they have to take advantage of an agreement or of favorable terms.

Insightful reports round out the oversight and provide your sales team, managers, and executives with real-time reporting of business metrics (closed deal, contracts out for signing, etc.)  Reports can be used to help build more complete forecasting and revenue analysis.  They can also be used to measure activity of sales reps, quantities sent, turn-around times for different types of transactions, success or drop-off rates of prospects, and much more.

SmartSign’s key focus is to help businesses grow, and shortening the “time to money”, is just one major benefit of our complete end-to-end solution.  Helping you improve your business is another.  Remember, if it can’t be measured, it can’t be improved.   SmartSign makes monitoring and measuring easy.

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