If you’ve ever looked for real estate across Australia or Asia, you likely visited a portal managed by REA Group. From its humble beginnings in a garage, to its success as a multinational digital company listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, REA Group has had to expand and adapt to meet its growing business needs through the years.

In an increasingly digital world, this has meant adopting new technologies and strategies to propel it forward. As a company that processes thousands of contracts a month, one of the technologies they’ve adopted in their journey is electronic signatures powered by Adobe Sign. “As a digital company, the need to move to an e-signature solution complemented our whole strategy in so many ways,” says Norm Duce, REA Group’s executive manager of business services.

Whatever your company’s offering, integrating new technology like electronic signature solutions can make an incredible difference in productivity, efficiency, customer experience, and security. And if your organization isn’t quite sold on the idea of e-signatures, here are five reasons — and lessons learned from REA Group — to help it make the leap.

1. Better customer experiences.
The first period of a customer’s interaction with your company is invaluable, and paper-based contracts are quickly becoming a thing of the past. With electronic signatures, you can guarantee a better, more seamless customer experience by allowing your customers to sign a document directly online. No more printing, signing, scanning, and emailing. Instead, your customers can do everything on their computers or smartphones.

“I’ve had so many customers come back to us and say, ‘Thank goodness you’ve put this technology to work,’” says Norm. “It’s so much easier for the customer when they need to go and organize multiple signatures or multiple acceptances to a contract. It’s a much more streamlined process doing it digitally.”

2. Faster processing and built-in progress tracking.
Keeping track of all contracts in progress at any given time can be daunting for sales staff. With Adobe Sign, you have the ability to track the progress of each contract and see where it is in the signature process.

“Having those record-keeping capabilities is not something that we thought would be a huge benefit when we first set out,” says Norm. “But now we’re seeing so many people are using that feature regularly, and it’s a great way of tracking where we are with all of our signatures and acceptances.”

This helps free-up time for sales teams, allowing them to focus on the larger goal: selling.

3. Boost brand image.
No one wants to be that guy still carrying a flip phone or the one who can’t figure out how to save a document to their computer. Customers value savvy, forward-thinking companies that give them confidence in their abilities to be efficient and to keep their information safe.

“It seems extremely archaic to be thinking, ‘I’m still shuffling pieces of paper around,’” says Norm. “When I joined REA Group, it was quite obvious that we were dealing with thousands of contracts a month. As a digital company, sending out and scanning pieces of paper just seemed to all of us like a dumb thing to be doing and something that was contrary to our entire brand.”

4. Work more efficiently.
One of the slickest features of Adobe Sign is its integration with the Microsoft Office suite, which can be set-up in minutes, and licensing eliminates the need to install extra apps. Plus, you can easily use Adobe Sign in your favourite Microsoft applications and email.

“Something that I’m absolutely amazed by is the interfacing into Microsoft systems,” says Norm. “It is an absolute winner to just send emails back and forth with the signatures and acceptances directly in your existing messages and threads.”

REA Group’s sales representatives also take advantage of Adobe Sign’s integrations with Salesforce to automate contracts, and their HR department uses the integration between Adobe Sign and Workday to speed up employee onboarding.

5. Scale growth and reach new markets with ease.
An electronic signature solution’s benefits reach far beyond signing documents. The tech frees up time and space. Taking paper out of the equation significantly increases the room for growth in a company because valuable resources don’t have to be spent on shuffling, filing, and storing documents.

“Simply dealing with pieces of paper and the previous legacy processes we were doing could not scale to the aspirational growth levels we had, and the actual growth levels we are seeing in our company now,” says Norm. “We are moving from dealing with thousands of contracts in a month to millions. I don’t think that it would have been possible without an e-signature solution.”

Adobe Sign is a global solution, and, as REA Group has expanded into the Asian market, their technology has been able to transition and meet strict regulations.

Clearly, digital technology is necessary for company growth and development — and with an electronic signature solution, that growth doesn’t need to be difficult.

Source: www.theblog.adobe.com