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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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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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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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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As business are becoming more mobile and fluid, employees are relying on smart-phones to do more than coordinate their emails. Smart-phones are a life-line or  hub of information for most businesses today so it only makes sense for the use of SMS (Short Message Service) text message notifications as a means of signer authentication. With eOriginal SmartSign, SMS/text ID verification can be applied in two separate methods for an added level of security:

• sending the signer’s Security Code for login
• a secondary authentication generated by a one-time system generated PIN which provides an additional layer authentication for signers

SmartSign’s flexibility allows businesses to leverage smart-phones to take your business to the next level of efficiency by not only authenticating users but also following through and allowing users to sign agreement using those ever important iPhones, blackberrys, Android, etc.  Please take the time to view the following video which walks the SmartSign administrator through the setup process and how the signer interacts during the SMS text process.

SMS Authentication Process

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Remote signing of transactions can be a challenge, especially when you don’t have an established relationship with the third party.  How do you know they really are who they say they are?  SmartSign offers a variety of authentication options to provide a higher level of confidence that the intended recipient is the actual signer.

• A Security code may be enabled to act as a password on the transaction.  Define a security code for each signer on the transaction.  Communicate the security code to the signer either verbally, via Email, or SMS (a.k.a. text message) notification.  The signer must correctly enter this security code to access the transaction.

• An Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)/Patriot Act compliance check may be enabled for any individual signer, verifying the signer has not been flagged as a risk by OFAC.

• An identity verification exam may be enabled for any individual signer.  The signer will be prompted to answer several “out-of-wallet” questions about himself.  The signer must correctly answer a pre-defined number of questions before gaining access to the transaction.  A report of the questions presented, information provided, and score may be retained.

• A one-time-use PIN may be enabled for any individual signer.  Provide a cell phone number for the signer (or allow the signer to provide it themselves) and the signer will receive text message with a one-time-use PIN.  The signer must correctly enter the PIN to gain access to the transaction.  Use of the one-time-use PIN authentication facilitates two-factor authentication, combining something the signer knows (the link to the signing room) with something they have (the physical device which is assigned to the cell phone number receiving the SMS notification).

The authentication method used to access the transaction is recorded in the sealed audit trail for the transaction documents along with supporting details (e.g. cell phone number, PIN).  These authentication options may be used independently or together, allowing you to define the optimal authentication solution for your organization.

For further information on SmartSign authentication options, please contact eOriginal Customer Support.

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eOriginal clients have the ability to link their Google account to their eOriginal login in order to import Google documents during the transaction creation in SmartSign Web.

Tying these accounts allows you to add a Google document(s) when the document is not part of an existing document type or you don’t have excess to your network. For those times when you are away from the office and you need a document electronically signed,  this is the solution you have been waiting for.

Here are the steps to link your Google account to your eOriginal login (SmartSign Web)

• Login – Administration – User Settings – Google Account – use link to access and grant access
• Google – grant access and create document library

That’s it!  Now you have the choice of accessing those Google documents during the document creation process.

Please take the time to view this short video on granting access to your Google account and how to upload those documents in SmartSign Web.

Google_Docs

The process is seamless and the advantages are endless.

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A few weeks ago I wrote a post, “What Does it Really Cost to have 10 Documents Signed”, where I explored the average costs associated with physically shipping, filing, and managing documents. I reviewed the costs of everything from printing to filing, but looking back, I realized I really only took a good look at the initial front end costs and benefits. There’s a whole other side I’d like to explore on the long terms benefits to moving to an electronic process and leveraging our Trusted Repository.

When you sit down and think about it, what can happen to your documents a few months or even a few years down the road? For our purposes for this post, we’ll ignore disasters such as floods, fire, or any other natural disasters. Even though they are real concerns for many businesses both large and small, let’s just focus on pure business related matters like legal challenges, audits, and administrative costs and effects.

So what happens if one or more of your contracts/agreements are challenged in court or if you are being audited? The Trusted Repository gives you the utmost control to track access and protect your documents throughout their entire lifecycle. The Trusted Repository uses digital “tamper seals” to protect the documents and their associated audit trails. This allows you to track every action taken against your document from when it was signed to who had access providing a better evidentiary package than paper-based processes. Since the signing process takes place in a closed-loop system, we can establish with all reasonable certainty that the signature and everything associated with your documents haven’t been compromised, something that is a lot harder to prove with paper.

When being audited, think of the number of documents you’ll have to pull from storage, physically transfer, and keep secure during the entire process. The task can be very daunting. However, through an electronic process, the steps needed to be taken can be made a lot simpler and easier. The Trusted Repository allows you to retrieve documents in real-time. All you’ll need to do is simply identify the documents you need and through a few clicks of your mouse and maybe a few keys punched, you’ll be finished in a fraction of the time.

The administrative costs of both instances can really pile up depending on the number of documents, storage facilities, and employee salaries all factored in. Just think of the time it takes to pull one file, let alone ten plus. In the long run, you may never face a legal dispute or get audited, but the right system not only saves and makes you more money in the short term, but it also protects you in the long run. Offering solutions that make us a complete package (short and long term) for our clients are why we are able to build a consistent and impressive ROI for our clients.

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