e-Signatures – a no-brainer for CCM in 2022

The COVID-19 pandemic forced many organizations to find new ways of operating in the digital realm. Widespread remote work, shutdowns, and social distancing mandates accelerated digital transformation across sectors, including areas of banking, lending, and insurance that had remained steadfastly paper-based.

As a result, consumers and businesses have become increasingly comfortable leveraging digital communications and processes, including leveraging electronic signatures (e-signatures) for contracting and agreements. Organizations looking to adopt e-signature as part of their digital customer experience, should look to leverage it as part of their customer communications management (CCM) strategy overall, rather than treat it as a standalone solution.

E-signatures are the digital equivalent of a “wet” signature and are legally binding representations of an individual’s agreement according to legislation at both the federal (ESIGN) and state levels across the US. E-signature solutions create a secure audit trail of who signed a document and when they signed it to ensure the authenticity and integrity of the electronic document. These capabilities are used in widespread applications across all sectors.  DocuSign, a leader in the market, pioneered e-signature capabilities and by its own statistics boasts over one million paying customers and one billion users worldwide of its technology.

Most e-signature products leverage text tags to capture the name, date, signature, and any other required detail from the individuals who are to sign the document. Text tags are a mechanism in which text is specifically formatted for insertion into rendered PDF documents. Inserting these tags is generally a straightforward process, which makes it possible for documents and communications generated out of a variety of software solutions to leverage e-signature capabilities.

Incorporating e-signature-based processes into a seamless customer experience requires that it not be treated as a standalone solution. Many industries are subject to both regulations and customer demands that require these experiences to continue to be available in multiple channels and when presented digitally, in accordance with the 508 compliance regulations.

Integration with existing CCM processes is essential for driving a consistent customer experience, while also streamlining back-of-the-house document authoring, production, and management processes. Some of the key capabilities to look for in a CCM solution to effectively support the integration of e-signature-based processes include:

• Intelligent content management capabilities that enable content authors and business users to directly author communications and document content without the intervention of IT teams. These content authors should also be able to apply targeting rules to ensure that the document contains relevant clauses, terms, details, and information in the communication. This is in addition to the critical need to insert relevant variable data from source systems to ensure accuracy and speed of document creation. Variable data insertion is a feature inherent in CCM systems. Look for systems that are also supported by AI that aim to improve the quality of communications by examining reading levels and sentiment of the content to improve the customer experience. All these capabilities in the hands of content authors empower your business teams with critical capabilities that enable them to rapidly produce and distribute accurate, personalized, and high-quality communications.
• Interactive communications support gives customer-facing teams the ability to generate contacts and agreements featuring e-signatures dynamically based on leveraging key account data and inputs from the customer interaction. Be sure to look for solutions that enable controlled editing where appropriate so teams have the flexibility to edit documents where it’s needed and not where it can lead to issues for the organization.
• Document generation systems that automatically insert the required e-signature text tags at the right insertion point in a document are essential. It’s critical that the system enables this to be done accurately given the potential for varying lengths for different types of contracts or agreements, which can push the e-signature text tag up or down in the document. Also, the key is that the system can generate a combination of output types described above for Accessible PDF, e-signature ready PDF, print-ready PDF, or other formats as required.
• Orchestration technologies that offer a means to process data through standardized APIs while affording the administrator the option to manage applications differently. For example, supporting a mix of real-time (on-demand) and batch capabilities depending on the requirements of the customer experience and the organization’s production capabilities. These systems must be able to support a combination of text, tables, and conditionality, as well as formatting to ease the consumption of complex information.
• Communication processing systems that can manage the flow of communications and notifications required. These systems have deep roots in integrity-based communication processing where controls ensure that the right communication is delivered to the right recipient through the appropriate channel and that no communication is left behind “undelivered”.
• Integration gateways that can enable “plug and play” a variety of delivery mechanisms and support data collection, chronology (date and time stamp capture) and easily integrate with a combination of digital fulfillment mechanisms.

How Messagepoint helps when e-signature is required

Messagepoint supports customers needing to deliver any kind of composed client communication, across all channels including print, Web, SMS, email, PDF, and e-signature enabled PDFs.

For organizations looking to leverage e-signatures within their communications, Messagepoint provides a ‘no-code’ capability for inserting the signature text tags that are used by the DocuSign platform to identify the name, date, signature, and any other required detail of the individual who is to sign a document. Text tags are configurable within the Messagepoint platform to provide content authors with the flexibility required to capture and reflect all the required information.

Messagepoint provides end-to-end control over customer communications across all channels. From our intelligent content management hub, communications composition, interactive communications, orchestration, delivery, and archiving, Messagepoint has you covered. We also play nicely with others, and layer on top of existing composition and digital delivery systems to enable you to modernize your communications without tearing out existing systems.

For more information on how Messagepoint can support your e-signature needs, contact us.