Signeasy’s approach to 2023 is unlike anything we had in the last few years. The year 2020 threw us off our course, but we managed to adapt quickly and scale. We relished the tailwinds of fast-tracked digitalization in 2021 and faced its headwinds in 2022. Time is a leveler.
The start of 2023 had different challenges: uncertain macroeconomic conditions, a tectonic shift with AI, and personnel changes within our team. As with any other year, our primary focus was to solve our customers’ problems. Only this time, it meant we’d be doing a few more things: ship key features, invest in our platform to scale, build a team with a customer-first mindset, and ride the AI wave. Doing all these tasks simultaneously, especially for a small team of about 70 people, is a stern challenge. It requires a superhuman balancing act.
While we are excited about what will come in the second half of 2023, it’s a good time to reflect on how the first half of the year went and what improvements we shipped for our customers.
A. Key platform investments What separates world-class products from good products are the non-functional requirements (NFRs). While we did adapt and scale rapidly to handle the digitalization wave in 2020, our platform needed to catch up. At times, our customers complained about the performance and reliability. It was clear that the current architecture could not support our scaling needs and effectively solve the problems for SMBs and mid-sized businesses. Their needs include access controls, folder organization, commenting, archiving, and more.
Hence, we decided to invest significantly in rebuilding our core infrastructure to enable faster development and provide our customers with speed, reliability, and delight. While we had to slow down feature development in the short run, we knew these efforts would eventually benefit our customers and enable us to win in the long term. In just under a month from now, all our customers will experience the improvements firsthand.
B. The service mindset The happy Signeasy customers often talk about the ease of use, value, and care they experience with our platform. We take pride in the ‘care’ aspect as it is close to our core principle of being customer-first.
Some of the initiatives towards this end include:
We encourage the entire team to engage directly with customers and build a culture of supporting users. All team members respond to support tickets. Our engineers take turns observing and addressing them. We formed a red squad dedicated to promptly resolving customer issues and implementing swift improvements. For most of Q1, 2023, we diligently pushed code daily. Regular check-ins with customers are not solely the responsibility of the customer success teams but also of the product, design, engineering, and executive teams. We always start with the question “What’s good for our customers?” in all our product and business discussions. Embracing the service mindset in building products and running a business will help us in the long term. Hence, we are consciously working towards fostering a culture that puts customers first. After all, we are in the Software as a Service (SaaS) industry.
C. Experimenting with AI It’s the year of AI. Companies worldwide are exploring AI to add more value to their products. AI can revolutionize the contract workflow from creation to collaboration to execution and archival. We at Signeasy have established an AI Labs team dedicated to achieving this. Much of our work over the last few months has been developing proof of concept (PoC) projects.
We are experimenting with how AI can save our users valuable time and effort. One of our primary focuses is providing our customers with essential information about the contracts they sign: important clauses, contract values, noteworthy dates, and more. These highlights will help you quickly grasp the critical terms within the contract. Another experiment we are excited about is automatic field placement, which would save senders a lot of time.
We will soon validate these features with a beta program. Based on our initial experience, these AI-powered features would save time, increase efficiency, and make the overall contract workflow more delightful.
D. New features and capabilities We are fortunate to have customers who don’t just do business with us but invest in our growth. They share valuable feedback and allow us time to fulfill their requests. To better accommodate their needs, we opened a feature request tracker at the beginning of April, and since then, ideas have been pouring in. We’d be shipping some of these later this year. Feel free to make a wish. :)
In the first half of 2023, we delivered some of the most requested features and implemented several improvements to delight our customers. With weekly releases, we strived to maintain a bug-free platform and ensure a smooth experience. Here’s a quick recap of the important features we introduced:
1. Attachments We started the year on a high note by shipping a powerful feature called Attachments.
Attachments help with collecting supporting documents easily and securely within the Signeasy platform. It saves time by cutting email back and forth and keeps documents secure and compliant. Learn how Attachments can help streamline your contract workflows .
✨ Interesting fact: 5,000+ secure attachments have been exchanged using Signeasy, effectively eliminating the need for back-and-forth emails.
2. Email Preferences It is the most requested feature from last year. While email notifications are essential to the Signeasy experience, they can sometimes be overwhelming. Hence, we have placed the control in our customer’s hands, allowing them to decide which emails will land in their inbox. Here’s how .
✨ Interesting fact: Email Preferences feature has resulted in a 39% reduction in email noise.
3. Read Receipts Read Receipts provide real-time email updates when the signers view the document. This context helps senders personalize follow-ups and make the right move.
4. Signature ID Signeasy’s Signature ID allows everyone to easily recognize signatures created on our secure platform - building trust with colleagues and clients. Know more about Signature ID .
✨ Interesting fact: 1000+ transactions carry Signeasy’s seal of trust due to Signature ID.
5. SharePoint Integration Signeasy offers many benefits to businesses with powerful integrations for Teams, Outlook, and now SharePoint . Our SharePoint integration allows you to sign, track, and store your contracts within Microsoft SharePoint.
✨ Interesting fact: Signeasy for SharePoint has reduced the average time required for completing a document transaction and storing it digitally to 10 minutes or less .
6. Expanding the Salesforce integration Signeasy is now compatible with the Salesforce Professional edition (the Enterprise edition support already exists). It empowers mid-market businesses with lean sales teams to power up their processes by preparing, sending, tracking, and eSigning their sales contracts and agreements within Salesforce.
7. Signeasy API v3.0 Signeasy offers easy-to-integrate eSignature APIs with well-defined documentation for developers to build, test, and go live quickly.
We started this year by launching a new and improved version, v3.0, with improved security, reliability, and performance. We’ve also simplified authentication and authorization workflows. It comes with a new developer portal that’s clean and intuitive.
✨ Interesting fact: 35% of our API customers are on v3.0.
8. A powerful new plan We have introduced the Business Plus plan tailored to fast-growing organizations requiring powerful features, unlimited usage, and enhanced security. Our customers can upgrade to the new plan within the app to enjoy its benefits.
✨ Interesting fact: 7% of our customers upgraded during their renewal period to the new plan.
Furthermore, we’ve added several minor but essential enhancements: a preview of documents before sending for signature, an improved field navigation experience, secure links to share completed documents, improvements to Template Links, and more.
Recognitions While we are hard at work, our partners and analysts noticed our strides:
The past six months have been filled with a focus on long-term vision, experimenting with AI, and an obsession with solving customer problems. It’s been a fun ride.
What’s next? Lift-off! We can’t wait for everyone to experience the renewed Signeasy that’s more powerful, reliable, and performant starting in August. We will deliver some exciting features, including the ability to save workflows as drafts, HubSpot integration (join waitlist ), edit in-flight documents, enrich our APIs, and offer AI-powered features (join waitlist ) to streamline your contract workflows. Also, the app would be redesigned for a better signing, sending, and tracking experience—2023 promises to be a good year.
P.S. Our webinar also delved into this topic. In case you're interested, here's the link to the 30-minute session we had with our customers.
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