Top 6 Benefits of Digital Contracts for Retailers

Contracts are a key part of doing business across all industries. And as retail sales are poised to reach nearly $5 trillion this year, it’s critical to ensure these agreements are drafted quickly and accurately. Utilizing digital contracts—and doing away with traditional hardcopy processes—can help you sign up new customers for services faster, onboard new employees quicker and remain competitive in this dynamic market.

In this blog, we’ll discuss how digital contracts address key issues and the top six benefits retailers can expect to see from implementing them. 

What is modern digital contracting?

Digitizing the lifecycle of a contract—from signing to point of sale—automates contract generation, streamlines negotiations, routes contracts to the right parties for signature, triggers communications and workflows and stores contracts securely. The end result of modernizing retail contracting is greater productivity across departments and a better customer experience. Now let’s take a deeper look into the benefits.

1. Work faster

Whether you’re hiring 20 seasonal employees, onboarding new vendors or signing up customers for a new service on Black Friday, you’ll do it faster and more efficiently with digital contracts. One large retailer cut employee onboarding time in half at all locations after implementing digital contracts, and a self-storage provider reduced the time it took to sign up new customers by 67 percent.

2. Eliminate errors

With digital contracts, you can require fields and designate people to sign in a specific order, eliminating the errors that typically happen with paper and manual processes. Docusign has helped household names such as Yamaha reduce errors in the contracting process while creating efficiencies and increasing contract compliance rates.

3. Automate processes

Paper-based processes are inherently slow. You can eliminate the associated manual work and increase productivity with guided forms, provisioned services and more. T-Mobile created a fully digital truth-in-lending document so they could process contracts on tablets in the store, leading to a 20 percent increase in their in-store close rate.

4. See and control what’s happening

Digital contracting gives you visibility into where contracts are and allows you to nudge signers with automatic reminders. This was critical for Sunrun, a leading residential solar installer that needed to guide customers through many complex documents and then provide full transparency and access to each agreement for the 20-plus-year life of a solar system.

5. Deliver a convenient experience

With a modern system of agreement, people can sign practically anywhere, anytime, on virtually any device—which is exactly the type of experience that customers, employees, vendors and partners expect. A rent-to-own housewares retailer digitized its leasing agreements for e-commerce shoppers buying furniture, allowing them to provide a frictionless experience shaving 1.2 minutes off every transaction, resulting in a 6 percent increase in orders created.

6. Alleviate stress

The retail business isn’t easy—there are neverending deadlines with holidays and other special occasions like back-to-school season. You have to deliver a superb customer experience every time if you want to keep your customers. Digital contracts are one way to remove some of that stress and do more with less.

The bottom line

Retail has changed dramatically in the past few years, and technology plays a huge role in retailer success today. The challenge is, there are so many options for managing that change that it’s hard to know where to focus your priorities. However, certain technology choices—like digital contracts—are no-brainers. All retailers can benefit from implementing them across departments.

Learn more about Docusign solutions for retail.