Why the Telco Industry Should Implement e-Signatures

The Growing Demand for eSignatures

In today’s ultra-digital world, customer expectations have done a complete 180. Rather than taking a trip to a physical location to sign papers, customers would prefer to do so from the comfort of their own homes. Since customers’ appetite for convenience has skyrocketed in recent years, traditional signatures are no longer enough to keep customers satisfied. Using eSignatures helps both businesses and customers save time on printing, sending, and waiting to receive signed papers. By simply signing with your finger or typing out your name on your phone, processes become much less complicated.

Benefits of Using e-Signature Solutions for Telcos

On the surface, eSignatures are beneficial because they are quick and easy. However, there is much more to it than that. Telco companies that use eSignature solutions have witnessed deeper benefits that help them improve their customer experience and bottom line. That’s because next-generation eSignature solutions aren’t just about eSignatures. They include a bundle of closely related frontend capabilities including eForms, photo ID verification, and visual order summaries. By harnessing eSignature platforms, telcos can:

• Increase ARPU & Upsell: Simplify the customer buying process with in-call media sharing, so agents can instantly show devices, accessory options, plans and pricing. Visualization boosts sales completion rates, increases ARPU, reduces return rates and strengthens customer loyalty.
• Simplify Compliance: Reduce AHT, simplify auditing, and improve customer experience by replacing agent scripts with instant acknowledgments of the offer summary and terms & conditions (T&C) with one click.
• Boost Compliance: Collect payment instantly via credit card with mobile-friendly, PCI compliant payment forms that improve completion rates and eliminate all risk.
• Accelerate Contract Signups & Renewals: Remove friction from signing up new customers with secure end-to-end contract management. Customers instantly complete their details with smart eForms, real-time approvals and T&C acceptance with eSignatures.
• Legally recognized: eSignature solutions surpass legal requirements such as the ESIGN Act and the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act.
• Integrated: Initiate and complete end-to-end contract processes directly from your website, IVR, CRM, in-store POS, or call center solution. Collaborative, real-time sync ensures that back-end systems stay current.
• Sign once: Instead of signing pages upon pages on a phone screen, customers can draw or type their signature once and use it in any other required spots on the document.
• Tamper-proof: All signatures are safe when businesses use technology-based timestamp records for all activities. This allows for complete compliance and eliminates any legal risks.
• Efficient Customer Service: Agents can walk customers through the entire eSignature process over the phone to ensure everything is signed the right way.
• Flexible: Top eSignature solutions allow businesses to provide options for their customers-they can give signatures through the typical mobile device, or alternate channels and devices such as email, the company’s website, Alexa, IVR, or in-store terminals.

eSignatures and Customer Experience

Understanding what customers want all comes down to one thing — convenience. Especially now, during a global pandemic, customers will do what is easiest and simplest for them. In fact, many people are still fearful of leaving their homes. Our recent customer survey indicates that 82% of customers are worried about going to their local bank or grocery store. With these fears looming, companies must provide newer digital solutions like eSignatures to ensure these activities are convenient. Fortunately, telcos enjoyed booming activity during the coronavirus. With a solid consumer market, all telcos have to do is capitalize on existing interest by making it easy for customers to buy mobile devices and plans remotely. To ensure this ease of sales and servicing, telcos need to remove all friction from the customer journey. For example, as mentioned above, a beneficial part of eSignatures is that there can be an agent to assist users. When customers need to wait on hold for hours to get a simple solution, technology suddenly becomes undesirable. However, when agents, whether they be AI chatbots or live agents, are able to help quickly, customers are satisfied. When telcos integrate new solutions, like Lightico, call centers can work with customers in real time to quickly solve problems.

• Shared Review: Review documents and bills with customers in real-time to fix any billing issues, increase customer satisfaction, and reduce agent call backs.
• Instantly update customer information by sending a web-form to their cell phone and stream the data right to your CRM.
• Verify customer identity in real-time to complete KYC and decrease risk of fraud.
• Collect payments in an instant, secure, and PCI compliant way.

Industries that Currently Use eSignatures

Lightico’s eSignature solution provides an easy, efficient solution for business-to-customer (B2C) companies that process a large number of transactions. In addition to telcos, the platform is typically used in the auto finance, banking, insurance, healthcare, and legal industries.

1. Auto Finance By using eSignature solutions, loan and servicing processes become streamlined, making them faster, effortless, and easy for both customers and agents.
2. Banking With digital platforms, banks can collect documents, ID, forms, signatures, consent and payments from any device with a few taps.
3. Insurance Lightico provides a way to make insurance claims become simplified and automated. Customers can talk on the phone with an agent while simultaneously sending in forms and documents required to process their claim and make mobile payments.
4. Law Using digital platforms like Lightico allows for a simpler client-facing process. As a result, signatures, documents, and payments can be processed quickly and without faxing, mailing, emailing, or in-person interactions.

How eSignatures Work for Telcos

More often than not, teleco sales experiences take the wrong turn due to overcomplications. It is difficult for agents and customers to work together the whole time because the process suddenly becomes overwhelming, causing the customer to be unsatisfied. When these sales calls result in frustrated customers, there are lost sales, added costs, and less customer loyalty. So, telecos have adopted eSignature solutions to simplify processes and retain customers. Communication between reps and customers involves a lot of multitasking to speed up the process. While on the call, reps share product images, visual order summaries, T&Cs, and quickly collect eSignatures, digital consent, payments, etc. Here’s how it works with Lightico:

1. Customer receives a text message from the rep with a Lightico link. Now the rep and customer are in a live session to complete the purchase.
2. Rep shares images of products for the customer to choose from.
3. Once the customer chooses everything they want, the rep creates a full order summary.
4. The summary gets sent to the customer immediately for review and approve in real-time.
5. The customer reviews documents about their order and submits an eSignature.
6. The rep collects payment information and completes the process.

All of the customer’s information and documents are automatically synced into the business’s system with a full audit trail. Customers can also review PDFs of their documents later on. Solutions like Lightico help improve customer experience in retail stores with streamlined customer onboarding:

• Speed up retail service & eliminate tedious paperwork by replacing it all with quick electronic documents and forms.
• Visual cart: Create visual order summaries and automated workflows that arrange related sales elements like products, subscriptions, fees, discounts, and associated T&Cs.
• Adjust in-store technology to better customer experiences. Use in-store tablets or send SMS messages to customer phones to complete tasks.
• Effortlessly speed up the completion of consent, signatures and T&Cs at point of sale to give more time for higher-value interactions.

After all of this, telcos see exceptional in-store experiences, accelerated in-store sales processes, and a reduction in operational costs. Tangible benefits of eSignature solutions for telcos include:

• Accelerated Sales & Increased Offer Take Rate
• Improved NPS & Customer Retention
• Automated Customer Workflows to Reduce Errors & Variability
• Expedited Service & Boost FCR
• Instantly Completed Onerous Billing Tasks
• Greater Agent Satisfaction and Retention

The bottom line

Ultimately, some of the largest companies in the world rely on Lightico to provide digital eSignature solutions to create a better customer experience and help the business grow. It’s time to eliminate heavy paperwork and time-consuming purchasing processes. eSignature solutions can help telcos digitally transform their customer transactions. Learn more at Lightico.com.