How the DocuSign Platform and APIs Accelerate Digital Transformation

In today’s market, customers—and employees—demand more, whether that's streamlining an existing processor creating a new experience that wows your customers. You’d be right to think of these new processes and solutions as a way to meet the wants of your stakeholders, but they can also be the core components of your digital transformation journey. As you work toward this transformation, the relationships you have with your employees, your customers and your data all need to be more dynamic and digital. While digital transformation is more essential than ever before, it's also more achievable than ever before.

When thinking about your digital transformation, DocuSign is a great place to start. With our easy-to-use web application user experience, you can get up and running in no time and speed up your core business processes. With our platform and APIs, you can take your digital transformation a step further as you scale toward your future needs, including customizing and integrating with any part of your business.

The next step in your digital transformation

Imagine you’ve started using DocuSign to digitize your process for sending documents for signature. You can task an employee to send documents for electronic signature, and they can upload those documents into DocuSign and send them out on a one-to-one basis. 

Say you have an employee who frequently needs to send a single type of document  out for signature. In order to manage that workflow, that employee still needs to set up all the necessary fields in the document every time it's sent for eSignature. While this is a step in the right direction, it still involves too much work on the employee’s part. This is where we bring in some of our out-of-the-box workflow capabilities. With Templates, that employee could prepare the document such that each new instance begins with the appropriate fields already set up. When they send out the document to the appropriate signers, they have saved themselves a ton of time and minimized room for error. 

Now imagine the same employee wants to leverage a template but send on a one-to-many basis . With Bulk Send, they can now send the same document to many users, saving even more time.

Leveraging DocuSign APIs

The key to accelerating digital transformation is the ability to package your services into modular components that can be repeatedly—and interoperably—leveraged across multiple contexts. This is where APIs come in, as the building blocks where you can pull in and utilize the key workflow components of the DocuSign Agreement Cloud. Doing so, you're able to augment your existing experiences and take them a step further than ever before. 

At DocuSign, roughly 60% of our transactions take place via our APIs. This volume of API usage reflects the power that our APIs offer as customers reimagine customer experiences, optimize internal workflows, integrate third party solutions and unlock new business opportunities. 

We’ve seen many customers lean on embedded signatures—a feature that allows you to bring the DocuSign eSignature experience into your web or mobile app—through the eSignature REST API to create a consistent and seamless customer experience, one that keeps the customer within their own domain and app. This tailored customer experience helps maximize brand exposure, building affinity and trust with users. Other ways in which our customers can create a consistent and seamless experience include using one of our mobile SDKs or prebuilt apps for offline signing or augmenting existing solutions with responsive layouts and custom notifications.

Customers also lean on DocuSign APIs to trigger workflows that accelerate the pace of business. From improving an embedded signing experience with pre-filled fields to automating the new hire paperwork process through a customer’s mobile app, we’ve seen a lot of possibilities to reduce human error and make manual processes more efficient. APIs also streamline efforts to maintain compliance, ensuring a smooth process and freeing staff to focus on other tasks.

Since most teams work in many business applications, DocuSign has over 350 prebuilt integrations to help connect your software stack. As a next step, you can even automate data flows between DocuSign and other business applications like CRM, data storage and productivity solutions based on your specific needs. For example, you may want to use our APIs to trigger actions in a third-party application based on the status update of an envelope. 

Visibility and security

However, there’s another digital transformation to discuss with APIs that’s potentially the most important of all. Digital ecosystems and API-first applications mean that your tried and true company firewall is no longer sufficient. Your APIs are now connecting with those from another company and your users are now using your new customer experience.That means that your API calls aren't just originating from the office anymore, they are being made from any type of device from anywhere in the world. This makes visibility and security imperative in every interaction. 

We take our infrastructure and security very seriously here at DocuSign. We do this because our customers deserve a platform that is always on, always available and has consistent performance 24/7. 

We house your most sensitive transactions, so it's important that the right people are interacting with the right information in the right way. Docusign invests in protecting our platform from a variety of external threats We conduct identity-related services to ensure that all people involved in a  transaction are who they say they are. We even produce artifacts at the end of transactions to attest to the legitimacy of the transaction once it’s complete..

We built our data centers in geographically dispersed configurations with near real-time data replication and our products are provided via a network infrastructure that is separated from the DocuSign corporate network and monitored 24-7 by our worldwide operations and security team. Our platform provides customers with control over how their users access our services, including access control systems such as Multi-Factor Authentication and Single-Sign-On with integrations into SSO products from OKTA, Microsoft and others. Each document stored within the DocuSign platform is encrypted using a rotating encryption key process that ensures no DocuSign employee ever has access to customer data. For extra security conscience customers, we have solutions that allow you to manage the encryption process within your own infrastructure. 

We also provide several types of recipient authentication so that customers know that the signer on the other end of the agreement is who they say they are. We do this with ID verification methods such as Knowledge-Based Authentication, photo ID and bank ID verification products. Each step in the agreement process provides audit trails that help provide confidence in the agreement process. 

Next Steps

At DocuSign, we’re here to help you take the next step in your digital transformation journey so that you can scale to meet any future need including customizing and integrating with any part of your business. 

To learn more about our Platform and APIs, catch the recording of our session on this topic from Momentum. Additional information is also available in the Developer Center and be sure to tune in to API Office Hours. As we continue to build out the future of the DocuSign platform, we’d love to work with you to connect the core components of our platform and drive new solutions for you.

Written by Vishal Naik, Director of Product Marketing at DocuSign