While replacing paper documents has had a profound impact on the speed businesses send and receive documents, the process itself still doesn’t quite feel like it’s designed for a digital-first world.

Why? Because we’ve just replaced physically mailing documents with digitally emailing them. Yes, it’s faster, but for digitally savvy customers and candidates, there’s still an enormous experiential gap. Navigating long-winded processes and disparate applications just don’t match their expectations of a serviceable digital interaction.

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Akshay Sheth, Vice President, Director, Engineering at Factset says:

“APIs should keep the user at the center of the developer experience by addressing the needs of their customers, rather than focusing on what’s easy to build from a business and engineering standpoint.”

But eSignature APIs that offer a fully embedded signature workflow can help bridge that gap and elevate an eSignature tool from a digitized version of a paper process into a full-blown digital journey.

And when you do reinvent your processes for the digital world, you attract and retain customers as well as reducing repetitive admin strain on your team.

Here are three key ways businesses can drive growth and reduce churn through an embedded signing experience.

Reduce drop-offs and disappearing acts

There’s nothing more frustrating than losing a prospect or candidate at the one-yard line. All that time and effort you’ve invested become a sunk cost that could have been better spent elsewhere. And that’s not good for business growth.

While replacing paper documents with eSignatures has increased document completion speed, it’s still not the perfect user experience. By the time eSignatures have sent a user on a return trip across the internet — from your website to their emails to a third-party site and back to your website — the chances they get distracted and never return increases.

Wouldn’t it be easier if users could sign within your website or application?

That’s exactly what embedded eSignatures do. By embedding eSignatures directly into your website or application, users aren’t forced into long-winded workflows full of distractions. Instead, they stay locked into one consistent experience — and that’s good for growth and retention.

In sales, for example, every extra step in your process lowers your chances of closing. By embedding eSignatures into your process, you can draw up contracts, send them out to be signed, and get them back, completely signed, in a few clicks.

The same goes for hiring new employees. Every extra step you put a candidate through is another chance for them to back out or accept another offer. When you can limit those steps and, in turn, reduce the time it takes to hire, the better your chances are.

And from what we’ve seen, when customers and employees aren’t bounced around the internet, form completion speed increases by as much as 28%.

Additionally, by custom-branding your signing experience, with functionality like Dropbox Sign’s white-labeling feature, signees only see and interact with your brand throughout the process. So they aren’t left wondering about the legitimacy of an off-brand page or whether they’re in the right place, because all they see is your brand.

With needless distractions and steps removed from the signing processes, you can spend more time and energy getting people ready to sign, rather than chasing them for signatures.

Reduce customer churn

It’s no secret, companies that retain customers grow faster. But did you know it costs up to 7x more to acquire a new customer than to retain an old one?

So if you’re looking to grow, the big question becomes how do you reduce customer churn? And that comes down to one thing: customer satisfaction.

That makes prioritizing your customer experience a critical part of your growth and retention strategy. In fact, 89% of companies with "significantly above average" customer experiences perform better financially than their competitors? The opportunity lies in your ability to deliver what you promised and make it easy.

So if your business requires documents to be signed regularly, then the easier you make that experience for customers, the happier they’ll be and the better your chances they’ll stick around.

This is where embedded eSignatures make a considerable difference to customer satisfaction. Because embedded eSignatures let customers sign documents directly in your website or app it saves them a huge amount of time and effort.

Say your customer is renewing their contract. Isn’t it much easier if they can sign right there on your website or app, rather than going back and forth over email — or worse, by mail. It’s these simple interactions that mean the world to your customers and separate you from the competition.

And great experiences are what customers are willing to pay more for. 86% of customers are willing to spend more for a great customer experience.

Whether it’s a signup form, a purchase agreement, a sales contract, or an entire onboarding workflow, the more painless you can make the signing experience for your customers, the more likely you are to reduce churn.

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Cut down employee admin

One of the biggest barriers to customer growth and retention for any business is an anvil of repetitive administrative tasks weighing teams down.

And it’s significant. Recent research from Dropbox shows U.S. teams are wasting as much as 29% of their day on tasks that don’t add value to the business.

So the more repetitive tasks you can remove from your staff’s day-to-day, the happier they’ll be and the more effort they can dedicate to pure growth activities like prospecting and hiring.

And embedding document templates makes a world of difference to how much time your teams spend formatting documents.

With embedded templates, your team has the power to create and save document templates right on your website or application. This means, your team doesn’t have to format important documents from scratch, over and over again.

For instance, using Dropbox Sign’s embedded templates, your HR team can upload a W9 or NDA templates. That way every time an employee needs those documents, they’re already pre-formatted and ready to go.

These templates help your sales team, too. By preloading contracts directly to your platform, sales reps can strike while the iron’s hot and cut days from your sales cycle.

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And that saves your teams a whole lot of time and frees them up to focus on growth and retention.

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Conclusion

It’s no secret the world’s fastest-growing companies strive to cut operational costs while increasing customer conversion and retention.

The thing is, most transformative technology isn’t some flashy new widget or device, it’s the “unseen” tools driving incremental gains that add up to better experiences across your business. And eSignature APIs are at the center of that improvement.

Learn how an embedded signing experience can drive your customer growth and retention strategy as well as create operational efficiencies for your business in our latest guide A non-technical guide to Dropbox Sign’s API.