Hello from Iowa! I hope everyone has had a great week. Your favorite road warriors at Agency Performance Partners are wrapping up a great week spent in Iowa visiting some of our favorite agencies, presenting at a few conferences and being generally blown away by the fact that there are states that exist where you can drive for 3 hours and still be in the same state!! I know, I know as a Rhode Islander it doesn’t take much to have our minds blown. Especially when you live in a state where nothing is more than 30 minutes away.
The reason I bring up our travels this week is because of two common themes I’ve noticed. The first theme is that every agency I’ve spoken with has brought up the question of efficiency. What tips, tricks or tools do we know of that can help my agency be more efficient? The second theme is essentially an answer to the first question and that is E-Signatures. I have heard from at least 7 agencies in the past two weeks about how using E-Signatures has saved their agency large amounts of time. Which comes as no surprise, let’s think about how it saves time. When we would normally send a document to either an existing or new customer it usually comes with the following steps for the end user(your customer)
- Print document
- Review document
- Sign document
- Scan document
- Send document back to agency
That’s five steps total for your customer who I can guarantee you would rather do 100 other things than go through that process. With E-Signatures you can literally send it your customer via email and they can sign it using their smartphone, tablet or computer and send it back to you immediately for processing. No more waiting for snail mail or counting the steps that the customer will need to take to get it back to you. You have eliminated it down to only having to use one piece of technology.
The even greater news is that in 2000 Bill Clinton passed the Digital Signature Act making it so that digital or e-signatures to documents were legal and binding. There are also several great online companies that provide E- Signature software. I recommend checking out Docusign or Signx as they both offer free trials. I strongly encourage every agency to try it out. It may not necessarily always be the best fit option for some of the older clients but ask them the next time you need their signature and they may surprise you. If you want to learn about other great time saving efficiencies be sure to keep checking our blog or give us a call.
