Is Your eSignature API Providing Everything It Should?

eSignatures play a significant role as businesses move more and more of their operations to the digital space. By eliminating paper waste, they’re environmentally friendly. They’ve also improved speed, eliminating the need to print and scan contracts by hand. eSignatures have been proven to be an extremely valuable step forward in modernizing the global transaction system.

However, e-signatures are just one step forward. There is still a great deal more work that should be done to continue modernizing the way users sign contracts.

API eSignature: An Improvement on Traditional eSignature

Though smoother and quicker than traditional pen and paper contracts, eSignatures have their own foibles and inefficiencies to work through. Managing versions of contracts and storing those back-end records can be difficult, and eSignatures can be hard to manage on mobile, where more and more business is being done. PDFs are great tools to move documents back and forth with the intention of printing them. But if you aren’t looking to print the files, why would you lock yourself into that format?

Related: Accept Contracts via SMS with PactSafe

Just as eSignatures were an improvement over pen-and-paper contracts, there are other types of signing that are an improvement on eSignatures. Your contracts could integrate into your apps. They could eliminate time bottlenecks, freeing your teams to do more with their time. An eSignature API can make that possible and increase the sales velocity of your process.

What Your eSignature API Should Be Doing

Your e-signature API should provide value in three major areas:

1. Be flexible to scale your business’ growth and product diversity;
2. Easily integrate into your existing apps; (Read: Implementation should be fast, not a months-long SOW project.)
3. Consist of embeddable widgets for adding fields and signing into your app.

A flexible eSignature API should integrate quickly and easily into your app. Your prospective customers should have the fewest steps possible before signing. No matter where they view the contract, and whether they are using a desktop, mobile site, or native app, they shouldn’t have to go to a separate window to review and sign any agreement.

For instance, if your company manages customers and prospects in Salesforce, integrating your eSignature API with your Salesforce instance would provide peak efficiency.

Contracting is a common-sense inclusion in any Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Contracts, after all, are a crucial step in building relationships with customers. Contracts define the scope of those relationships and are the first step of your onboarding process. You should be looking to make the process as simple as possible for the customer and yourself. Letting your contracts live inside a platform they will use is a natural way to accomplish that goal.

Related: Can eSignatures Make Your Business More Competitive

The Nitty Gritty: What developer tools your e-signature API needs

Integrating your e-signature API into apps such as your CRM is a strong start, but the work isn’t finished there. Your API should also provide multiple SDKs and a JavaScript library to help your developers nimbly integrate contracts into other locations when needed.

A successful e-signature API provides all of the following so your development team can be set for success:

• Support a modern, RESTful process that’s easy to embed;
• Provide helpful SDKs in the development stack you use;
• Embed a JavaScript library to add fields or get contracts signed;
• Send contracts for signature via email or text;
• Embed signing into your app;
• Connect requests for signature from outside your app (using Webhooks or some other real-time notification mechanism)

PactSafe: Your eSignature API solution

At PactSafe, we provide an e-signature API that allows you to build e-signature and click-through agreements into any app. See our Developer Toolkit to learn more and get started today.