Click Here to Sign

Quit making customers scratch their names on paper contracts, urges Mike Regan, Pearl Izumi custom sales manager. Electronic signatures are helping his department save time, meet deadlines, avoid errors, reduce labor costs and improve customer relations.

“It actually fulfills the overarching goal of technology, that [it’s] supposed to make life easier, not more complicated,” says Regan, whose Louisville, Colo.-based company supplies running and cycling apparel to retailers.

The benefits of electronic signatures, or e-signatures as they are called, can accrue for any retailer with contracts to manage, analysts say. “Our latest data shows 72 percent of retailers are interested in having e-signature capture software on their mobile devices,” says Sahir Anand, retail research director at the Boston-based Aberdeen Group.

E-signature definitions abound. Some characterize them as any electronic sound, symbol or process used with the intent to sign. While some are digitized images of handwritten signatures, others use biometric identifiers or personal identification numbers.

Easy integration
Regan happened onto e-signatures almost by accident, when he noticed they integrate with an online file-sharing tool his custom products department was using. He found the e-signature technology of Palo Alto, Calif.-based EchoSign inexpensive and easy for his staff and customers to use.

EchoSign has been in business five years and has 30,000 paying customers and 2.5 million users, according to CEO Jason Lemkin. About 85 percent of those customers use EchoSign for sales-related contracts; the balance use it for legal matters, human-resources activities or finance.

To use EchoSign, a business sends an electronic copy of a contract to everyone whose signature is required. To sign, the recipients of the contract type their names: As letters are typed, they also appear in a generic handwritten-looking form in another box called “Review Your Signature.”

Signers also have the option of drawing their signature with the computer mouse. Clicking another option enables signers to sign in using their web identity on Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Yahoo or Microsoft.

Next comes the moment of truth: Signers either click on one button to “eSign” or click on another to indicate their refusal to sign. Clicking on the latter triggers a pop-up box that asks signers to indicate a “simple refusal” or type an explanation for the decision.

A copy of the signed document is e-mailed to all parties. As with all e-signatures, software binds the signature to the specific document and prevents alterations once the contract is signed.
Retailers can use the system just about as easily as signers, Lemkin says, by creating an account or skipping that step and using a Google ID. “So, literally, in 20 seconds [they are] logged into EchoSign,” he says.

Ease of use has made e-signature popular with staff and customers of Pearl Izumi’s custom products department, says Regan. Employees “can turn on their subscription today and within an hour or two be a total rock star using the tool.”

Simplifying complex contracts
The simplicity of the user interface helps customers sign electronically with little difficulty, even if they use it as infrequently as once a year, Regan says. “People who aren’t really web-savvy and don’t understand contracts … can figure it out, and they get it back to you fast.”

Achieving simplicity means a lot for Regan’s department and its customers because the custom apparel business is founded on complex contracts, he says. Every sale — whether it is jerseys for the Tour de France or for a group ride on a law firm’s corporate retreat — requires a contract specifying sizes, styles and every detail of the artwork.

The custom fabrication cannot begin until the contract is signed, so persuading customers to return the documents quickly takes on extreme importance, Regan says. Before adopting e-signatures, his department required customers to fax back 15-page documents — a task many signers understandably postponed. Asking customers to print out e-mailed contracts, sign them and fax them back led to even more severe procrastination.

“So, we had a real challenge because everybody orders things at the last possible minute and wants it as soon as possible,” says Regan. “If we lose a couple of days trying to get contracts back, that can make all the difference in the whole world of meeting their delivery date.”

EchoSign also combats customer procrastination by sending automatic reminders to the user or the customer. That way, any blame for “badgering” falls to EchoSign, not to Pearl Izumi, Regan says. When sending a reminder, the system can re-send the contract, freeing the customer from having to search old e-mail messages to find it.

The user decides the frequency of the reminders and determines who receives them, says Regan. Otherwise, he would have to keep track of who has not replied and contact the procrastinators himself. “I can take that off my to-do list,” he says. “The system does that for me.”

Instead, Regan now clicks on the management tab to view a list of contracts that tells how long they have been out. It even provides such data as the average time required for signing.

Regan’s department averages one contract per day, but Lemkin says EchoSign can handle any volume.

“If you’re a very small retailer, doing five or fewer contracts per month, it’s literally free,” he says. A company with a single user can process an unlimited number of contracts with electronic, fax, mobile or biometric handwritten signatures and keep an archive of the 500 most recent documents for $14.95 a month.

With two to nine users, companies pay $40 to $180 monthly to receive additional features. Costs begin at $299 per month for 10 or more users on the “Enterprise” plan or $399 per month on the “Global” plan.

For Regan’s department the cost is well worth the service, and an interruption proved it. When his staff had been using e-signatures for about six months, the company’s legal department imposed a six-month moratorium to research the technology and sent the workers back to faxing contracts.

Staff and customers “moaned and screamed” about the hiatus and happily returned to electronic contracts once the legal department “blessed” the process, Regan says.

“We get most of our documents back in 10 minutes as opposed to three or four days,” he says. “For us, it’s huge.”