Agreement Transformation Starts Here: Highlights from Momentum 2021

At Momentum 2021, we hosted thousands of our customers and partners (virtually) to hear from industry visionaries on the frontlines of digital transformation, listen to Docusign customers discuss how they have transformed their agreement processes and learn about Docusign’s latest product features. Through customer interviews, demos, panels and breakout sessions, customers joined us for a review of the innovation we saw over the last year, the current agreement technology landscape and beyond. Here are some highlights.

Business continuity challenges and rapid digital transformation

The pandemic brought tremendous loss and disruption to every country in the world. In his opening remarks, Docusign CEO Dan Springer reflected on the challenges everyone faced, and how we were able to help: Healthcare organizations created paperless patient intake processes. Government agencies stood up digital and mobile experiences to serve citizens. Organizations of every shape and size adapted to “work from anywhere.” And it continues today, as Docusign supports paperless consents and other agreements for vaccinations.

Dan concluded his reflections about COVID-19 by noting that it accelerated organizations’ transformation from paper to electronic signing—a transformation that was already happening because electronic signing is easier, faster, more cost-efficient, and more secure than the old way. With that, Dan transitioned to a perfect example, talking to Progressive Insurance’s CEO Tricia Griffith about her company’s use of Docusign eSignature.

Griffith said that Progressive uses the eSignature API to embed Docusign eSignature in both the Progressive web and mobile-app experiences: “We have so many transactions that it’s really mission-critical, and it’s expected from our customers.”

Progressive works with 40,000 independent agents to provide customers with the insurance they need. Griffith explained that those agents have choices about who to work with, so Docusign’s ease of use gives Progressive an edge: “[Agents] being able to take care of our mutual customers with that ease of use means we gain more business because we made it easy for them.”

Finally, Griffith explained that Docusign is playing an important role in Progressive’s initiatives on behalf of the environment: “We’ve been able to reduce our paper by literally millions of pounds because the majority of our policyholders go paperless because they have the ability to sign the necessary documents and not have to waste paper. It’s great for the environment and, honestly, not just our customers but our employees expect it.”

Innovation to meet customers’ expectations for digital experiences

As always, Momentum was a chance for us to showcase some of the latest features we’ve added to Docusign eSignature. Docusign Chief Operating Officer Scott Olrich introduced a series of demos around the theme of Docusign being the best way to agree to anything, anywhere.

New eSignature features

In honor of Tricia Griffith being our first guest, we showed an insurance demo that included the following recent features:

• Responsive signing: Improve the display of your agreements based on the signer’s device type. Responsive signing automatically converts documents to HTML and allows you to preview the conversion across device types prior to sending. Signers see the responsive document in an easy-to-read format.

• SMS delivery: The average response time to an SMS message is 90 seconds. SMS delivery and notifications help you and your teams get work done faster, wherever they are.

• Integrations: Allow your senders and signers to do business faster using Docusign eSignature within the tools they’re already using. The demo featured a new integration with Microsoft Teams. It joins other recent integrations with Slack, Workplace by Facebook, and Google Workspace, which are just a few of our 350+ integrations.

Introducing Docusign Notary

Next, we introduced our latest way to agree to anything, a product that Scott could safely say is here by popular demand: “You’ve been asking us to provide the full Docusign treatment for notary transactions that were not only electronic but also remote, meaning that participants and the notary can meet via audio-visual session but with the necessary controls and auditability to make it both easy and most importantly, legally enforceable.”

We then demoed, for the first time publicly, Docusign Notary, the trusted way to remotely and electronically notarize agreements. It gives notaries public the tools they need to securely conduct remote online transactions via an encrypted audio-visual session. Notary conveniently guides all parties through the identity verification, signing and notarizing process, while helping mitigate risk with a robust audit trail, audio-visual recording and electronic journal.

The initial release of Docusign Notary supports organizations in the United States who either employ or contract with notaries public.

The next cloud is The Agreement Cloud

Having started with signing and notarizing, Scott then expanded the view to his second innovation theme: connecting the entire agreement process—from preparing to signing, acting on, and managing agreements. It’s what the Docusign Agreement Cloud is about, and we showed it with a demo that combined Docusign CLM (contract lifecycle management), Docusign Analyzer (AI-based contract analysis and risk-scoring), and eSignature. 

This brought us to our next customer guest, James French, delivery director at Arm, the company whose chip designs are in 90% of mobile devices, reaching 70% of the world’s population. French described how Arm started with Docusign eSignature, later added Docusign Insight (AI-based analytics of a contract repository), Docusign CLM, and Docusign Click (clickwrap agreements).

Echoing the CLM demo, French said, “Using Salesforce as a platform, we use Docusign CLM to generate contracts, track negotiations, all the way through to that eSignature process—so end-to-end, keeping all of our contract workflows on-system. It allows us to automate a lot of the processes after signing as well, which means our customers get our products much quicker in their hands to use in their engineering teams.”

Services for customer success

Scott then introduced Kim Peretti, Docusign GVP Customer Success, who told the transformation stories of Uber and Compass.

• Known for its ride-sharing service, Uber saw a surge in demand for its Uber Eats food-delivery service when COVID-19 hit. The company worked with Docusign’s Customer Success team to define requirements and implement a solution that included eSignature and Docusign CLM, integrated with Salesforce. In addition, we helped Uber build a custom training program to maximize adoption, and a center of excellence to introduce best practices throughout the company. As a result, Uber trained 10,000 users, who have generated more than one million contracts—each saving time, cost, and risk.

• Compass is one of the largest real estate brokerages in the United States, with more than 18,000 agents. A relative newcomer to the real estate industry, Compass achieved its leadership position through rapid growth that strained its traditional contracting processes. Our Platinum Services Partner ATG worked with Compass to automate contracting processes via Docusign eSignature and CLM, integrated with Salesforce and CloudSense. The project focused on streamlining Compass’ quote-to-cash process and improving data-integrity issues among systems. As a result, Compass has a platform that not only allows them to do business faster now but also into the future as the company continues to grow rapidly.

Integrating with systems people use

Scott closed his section with a third innovation theme: Docusign’s integration with systems where work and life get done: “Our products are the starting point of any Agreement Cloud solution, but they need to connect with the other products that people already use.” That’s why we have more than 350 prebuilt integrations, as well as award-winning APIs for custom solutions.

Scott then highlighted one of our latest integrations, in this case focused on our small business customers: an eSignature integration with Intuit’s QuickBooks Online, the first name in small business accounting. The demo showed how a small business owner could create an estimate, then use the new “Save and send with Docusign” option. 

Sustainability as a business goal

We closed the Momentum 2021 keynote with our commitment to help protect the world’s forests. When organizations use Docusign, they dramatically reduce the need for paper. Together, we have preserved over 2.5 million trees required to make paper. In 2019, we took a further step for the environment with Docusign for Forests, a program we launched with Dr. Jane Goodall to protect what she calls “the lungs of the earth.” 

As part of the program, we’ve committed $2.5 million to organizations doing critical work to preserve the world’s forests, including The Jane Goodall Legacy Foundation, The Wilderness Society and The Nature Conservancy. Today, we added another wonderful organization to that list: the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). We were excited to welcome Michael Marus, FSC CIO and Director of IT, to the virtual Momentum stage to share how FSC works to ensure that forests are managed in a sustainable manner. 

Thank you to everyone who joined us for the livestream. If you missed it, watch the replay on our Docusign Momentum website.

Learn more about the Docusign Agreement Cloud.

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