APIs have unquestionably transformed how businesses operate by creating connected experiences, automating manual tasks, and providing the tools to work more efficiently for some of the most successful digital companies, like Apple and Microsoft. But it’s not just big tech companies that can benefit from APIs.

Small and medium businesses can find similar time-saving, cost-reducing benefits of APIs. And they can be incredibly easy to set up. Take the DropboxSign eSignature API, which fits neatly into existing workflows to help growing businesses improve their customer experience, get agreements signed faster, lower the cost of manual approvals, and reduce the amount of repeat data input for employees and customers. Not bad, right? Here are four real-world businesses that have seen the benefits of the DropboxSign API in action first-hand.

1. On-platform signing cuts applications from 2 weeks to 8 minutes

Whether you sell widgets or plumbing services online, the faster and easier you can make it for customers to work with you, the more likely they are to buy—and come back. It’s this kind of experience that Pigeon Loans, a peer-to-peer lending platform that facilitates loans between friends, family, and loved ones, knew it needed to separate itself from the other lenders on the market.

Traditional lending processes are fragmented and involve a number of manual tasks and different tools—like managing tracking spreadsheets, setting up payment reminders, storing documents, and signing agreements. To improve the experience for its customers, Pigeon Loans wanted to overhaul its application experience, and keep its signers on-platform from start to finish.

That’s when they discovered the Dropbox Sign API. Using the Dropbox Sign API, Pigeon Loans embedded Dropbox Sign functionality directly into its website so customers could go through the entire loan application process—including signing legally binding documents—without leaving Pigeon Loan’s platform. As a result, Pigeon’s loan process dropped from 2 weeks to 8 minutes.  

And if that’s not impressive enough, Pigeon Loans implemented it in record time. “I’ve implemented other APIs and it usually takes about a week. Dropbox Sign is using such forward-looking technology, along with clear and easy-to-understand documentation that I was able to do it in less than 3 hours. This was a record for me,” says Brian Bristol, CTO and Co-Founder.

2. Integrations fuel 164,000+ job applicants a month

When businesses grow so do the number of manual processes. Traditionally businesses have taken one of two actions to address growth challenges: hire more people or endure slowdowns and bottlenecks. However, by using the right APIs, instead of managing manual processes, you can automate away many of them.    

Hiring platform Fountain, for instance, needed to keep up with a growing number of applicants. Rather than hire more people to manage more applications, they looked for APIs that could help automate some of these processes. One of which was an eSignature solution that could integrate mobile document signing into its recruitment platform.

Using the Dropbox Sign API, applicants now spend an average of 6 minutes signing key documents, a whole 37 minutes quicker than traditional methods. This new process means Fountain’s team intervene less in the recruitment process, which makes managing a huge volume of signatures across a global job market faster and simpler for Fountain’s staff, customers, and 164,000 monthly hires. “At Fountain, we strive to provide a seamless branded experience across corporate sites and customized job directories. Automated document signing supports this, allowing candidates to apply for jobs on the go and move swiftly to be hired,” says Sean Behr, CEO of Fountain.

3. Lower the cost of internal approvals

Integrations aren’t just for improving experiences and efficiencies externally, they also have massive cost and time-saving benefits for businesses who deploy them for internal processes.

ISCA, for instance, integrates the Dropbox Sign API to speed up and manage its internal approvals. Before Dropbox Sign, projects that involved senior management would require multiple signatures from different department heads. But bottlenecks and lost documents made this a difficult task to manage. Mistakes could necessitate a reprint and add another 20-30 pages of paper. And because ISCA’s documents must be approved by stakeholders in a particular order, any deviations meant they’d have to repeat the entire signing process over again.

But by deploying the Dropbox Sign API, and its built-in logic, much of ISCA’s internal paperwork is processed much faster and with less paper. Using the Dropbox Sign API, ISCA employees seeking approvals from multiple members of senior management can set the order they want people to sign, and let Dropbox Sign take care of contacting and reminding every signee. That means no time is wasted managing and tracking the signing process, and the right contracts always find their way to the right people. 17 departments now use Dropbox Sign, and as a result, ISCA has reduced paper costs by over 10% by eliminating around 10,000 pieces of paper every month.

4. Reducing repeat data input

How much could you grow your business if you had an extra 250 hours to put towards sales? That’s exactly what VEHICULUM, a vendor-independent vehicle leasing company, unlocked when it integrated the Dropbox Sign API into its platform.

VEHICULUM’s platform helps businesses find the right vehicle at the best possible price, with over 15,000 corporate customers throughout Germany. But manual data entry was holding them back. They needed a replacement for their traditional print-sign-scan-fax workflows that were slow and disconnected from the loan approval process.

To help, they turned to the Dropbox Sign API to digitize the data entry process, which allowed dealers and banks to use information customers entered immediately. Digitizing the process reduced the need to download and print forms, and eliminated repeat data entry, saving customers an average of 15 minutes on each application.

As each VEHICULUM salesperson processes around 1,500 requests each month, they’re now able to regain around 250 hours to be better spent elsewhere. “We pre-fill fields for the customer with the information he or she previously entered in our order process. The only thing the customer needs to do is sign at certain places in the document. That’s it,” explains Florian Nitschmann, Software Engineer at VEHICULUM.

Start creating your custom integrations today

Ready to add a custom Dropbox Sign API integration into your business workflows? Talk to one of our API experts today to learn how a custom eSignature integration might work for your business.

Or if you have a use case in mind, you can try out the Dropbox Sign API for free right now. We’ve got a whole host of documentation to guide you through setting up your first integration, and with a quick-start guide, you’ll be up and running in no time.

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