Major US-based airline United has collaborated on a customer case study for e-agreements in the cloud with vendor Docusign.
Stefan Josephson, senior manager of IT application development at United Airlines, has been quoted as praising the seamless human resources (HR) integration with corporate platform ServiceNow in particular.
“We needed the process to be user friendly, legally immutable and trusted,” Josephson reported for the DocuSign case study.
“Getting people in the door for day one was always a challenge. Our challenge was to find a more efficient way to accurately get these forms signed, returned to the team that processes them, and securely stored for auditing purposes.”
DocuSign filled that need for an improved onboarding and employee experience, reducing the burden of paperwork for HR, especially around employee background checks, the case study said, with some 87,000 roles at the airline.
With DocuSign e-agreements, there can be fewer transposition errors or typos and it takes less time to do paperwork – including fingerprint-based criminal checks – that previously meant filling out documents manually before final authorisation.
“Now, everyone benefits from a faster and more transparent process that’s centralised in United’s Help Hub employee portal,” the vendor confirmed.
HR also now has “real-time visibility” of operational data in ServiceNow, such as how many submissions are queued or incomplete in various locations or divisions. United is also using the integration for surveys and release forms for certain contractor employees being offboarded, DocuSign added.
IDC named DocuSign a Worldwide Marketscape e-signature software leader for 2023 for both its strategies and capabilities – with e-signature assisting wider efforts to digitise and automate documentation processes.
The vendor offers various integrations to enable its Agreement Cloud technology to work with other popular applications. November saw DocuSign add integration with Whatsapp, meaning workers can potentially sign agreements while using the popular Meta-owned messaging app.
Mangesh Bhandarkar, general vice president of product management at DocuSign, said the idea is to make agreements friction-less end to end.
“In an era of evolving consumer preferences, DocuSign is the only provider that offers customers a true set of mobile multi-channel delivery mechanisms, whether SMS, email or messaging platforms like WhatsApp,” he claimed in the related announcement.
Nikila Srinivasan, business messaging vice president at Meta, said it was about “meeting people where they are” on their phones and in chats to best help them, for instance, close deals.
“We [envisage] a world where everyone can get business done right from their favourite messaging app. Bringing together the reliability and security of WhatsApp and the simplicity of e-signatures from DocuSign is an exciting extension,” Srinivasan said.
