A direct impact of COVID-19 is that businesses have been thrust into new ways of working, and they have had to adapt at a lightning pace.

That’s a well-trodden observation already, and a wide one. But it covers a thousand changes unique to the working culture and operations of individual businesses, big and small, around the world.

DocuSign’s Momentum Live APAC virtual event brought leaders from the tech platform – most well known for its e-signature solution – together with household name clients to discuss the business challenges faced by their organizations, and the approaches they are taking to overcome them.

Paperless by necessity

The disruption caused by COVID-19 has revealed just how reliant we have become on technology in business. But it has also highlighted how technology can enable us to react to change and continue operations and communication – internally and with partners and clients – albeit in vastly different ways than we are used to.

Companies like DocuSign, which have long been enablers of our increasing digitization, are showing themselves to be providers of quite vital tools to ensure disruption is minimized. And, with remote working likely to remain in place to a degree after the pandemic, they are subsequently cementing themselves as stalwarts of business for the long-run.

Opening the floor, DocuSign’s CEO Dan Springer explained how the company has mobilized its team and enhanced the DocuSign Agreement Cloud to help pull organizations – across industries from healthcare, government, education and many others – through this crisis in what has come by necessity a near-100 percent paperless world.

“The reason we’ve been supporting a lot of businesses with COVID-19 responses is because written agreements are the basis of doing business,” said Springer.

“There are agreements in every business function, from contracts with customers and sales, to vendor contracts and procurement.”

All these contracts now need to be executed remotely, and DocuSign is allowing businesses to do this simply and securely, and across multiple devices, ultimately removing pain points and enabling digitized workflows.

Just some of the ways DocuSign has directly contributed solutions in the current crisis is in healthcare, making patient intake processes touchless, faster and easier to track. Its solutions have also been put to excellent use in emergency government services in Australia, enabling those organizations to quickly bulk-send personalized JobKeeper applications to their employees.

But MomentumLive APAC explored how businesses from a range of sectors have leaned on DocuSign to adapt.

Obsessed with experience

For an enterprise as successful and consistently ingrained in the corporate world as KPMG, resilience and adaptability are cornerstones of its operations.

Craig Wishart, CIO of KPMG Australia told DocuSign’s VP & GM, APAC, Brad Newton, that remaining “seamless” in any circumstance is a core expectation of his team, and that comes with a great reliance on enabling tech solutions.

But even for the managed services giant, COVID-19 has brought lessons in digitization: “Throughout this COVID-19 crisis the advantage of digitized workflows has just become more evident.

“Being able to have DocuSign support us in the sense of our workflows and processes, it’s really helped us make that transition to full remote work.”

KPMG now embraces DocuSign internally and externally, whether it’s for invoices, staff reimbursements or completion of training. The solutions provide transparency and traceability, but also a higher level of security than paper documents and even some email-based document exchanges.

In stark contrast with the days of “pigeon holes and office trolleys”, solutions like DocuSign are simply making the experience of doing business better for employees and partners. And that should not be underestimated both today and in post-COVID industry.

“CIOs are going to have to become increasingly obsessed with the experience they provide and technology is one part of that. How you engage with people; that’s going to be the big differentiator,” Wishart said.

Signed, sealed and delivered

With APAC operations spanning Australia, Southeast Asia and China, graphic design platform Canva’s teams are in various states of lockdown, and like many other organizations, the company is going through an “ongoing learning curve.”

That said, the platform has adapted quickly and is even playing a key role in the visual information campaigns by the likes of the World Health Organization and the French Government.

Tiffany Tai, Canva’s General Manager of Enterprise, Partnerships and BizOps, told DocuSign’s Customer Marketing Manager, APAC Jennifer Norrie that key to adaptability is being empathetic with employees, and ensuring their well-being in a difficult time comes first. The next biggest priority is maintaining a rapid pace of business.

To that end, Canva has embraced DocuSign’s ability to quickly integrate with a plethora of tools and solutions; in this case, Salesforce.

“We rolled [DocuSign] out just ahead of COVID-19 which was really great timing for us. Because now that we’re remote we want to be able to have as much visibility as possible over all contracts going out.

“We’re very customer-centric. [DocuSign] isn’t just a nice ‘toss in’ – it’s pretty critical to the core of our business if we want to top of our game.”

Tai claims that, thanks to DocuSign’s Salesforce integration, the time it takes for a Canva field-based representative to close and ensure a contract is “signed, sealed and delivered” is now less than five minutes, “which is huge for us across the board” and ticks the boxes for usability and security across the rest of Canva.

“You got something that’s fast, scalable and will save money in the long term”.

Additionally, Tai noted that while many of Canva’s customers are e-signature-savvy, others are “still sending faxes or using snail-mail.” DocuSign has been easy to introduce to these groups and, because of that, the business can move at its desired pace.

A long-term enabler

With businesses shifting to solutions that we might think are temporary quick-fixes, we are uncovering new ways of doing things which, in some cases, will have staying power long after this crisis resides and markets once again become fully-operational.

That’s true even for financial services globestraddlers like Prudential, whose Singapore Head of Distribution Business Management, Sherwin Siregar, told DocuSign’s Head of Sales Asia, Nicholas van Breda, how the firm’s usual client-facing approach has undergone “a strong pivot”.

While Prudential Singapore has long had a flexible working policy, crucial aspects of the business, such as providing financial advisory services, are usually carried out in person. Technologies, including that of DocuSign, have enabled these meetings to be effectively switched to virtual settings.

“In remote calls where advisors are providing advice, the last acknowledgement form is now possible with DocuSign, even in a call.”

The seamlessness of these new processes is opening doors for a more flexible offering, even when play resumes. Siregar explained that because clients appreciate the flexibility and instantaneousness of the approach, light has been shed on where processes can be enhanced.

“Post-pandemic we expect that many of these processes will still be around,” he said, advising other firms to embrace the current market to explore areas for digitization.

“Just look at your pain points, look at things slowing you down and start there.

“Something like [DocuSign] makes it easier for staff to use, and should make them better and more efficient […] you’re allowing a new capability that previously you didn’t have.

“A lot of these solutions and enablers need to carry on to be able to provide that enablement, post-pandemic.”

For a full view of how DocuSign is directly helping businesses through the current crisis, view the COVID-19 response page which features a foreword from helmsman Springer himself.

For those who missed DocuSign’s Momentum Live virtual event, you can catch up now.