Challenges

Pioneers like DocuSign are turning time-consuming pen-and-paper contracts into museum relics. 

Organizations use DocuSign to manage and share electronic agreements. Trusted by hundreds of millions of users, DocuSign eSignature helps companies send and sign documents, from sales contracts to job offer letters and everything in between.

DocuSign has been simplifying contracts since 2003. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the SaaS company became a vital lifeline for companies and industries that may never have considered digital signatures before, like healthcare and banking.

These clients’ needs were urgent and confidential, and many were tied to daily survival during the pandemic, such as labs signing up patients for vaccine trials, and schools distributing meals to kids who didn’t have enough food at home without free school lunch. 

With rapid growth comes growing pains. In March 2020, DocuSign was still scheduling meetings with customers manually via back-and-forth emails and phone messages. With thousands of new clients across the world — many trying to onboard the same day or same week — manual scheduling just couldn’t keep up.

The manual customer success system couldn’t scale. It was time for a major change. DocuSign chose Calendly for its ease of use, scalability, security, and flexibility. DocuSign started with a trial to make sure Calendly was the best fit for the team. Three weeks later, DocuSign’s entire customer success department was using Calendly. 

Solution

Scaling customer success quickly

When DocuSign adopted Calendly in 2020, businesses around the world were facing new challenges every day. DocuSign wanted to make at least one thing easier for their customers. 

Compared to the back-and-forth emails that make up manual scheduling, booking through Calendly created a far better experience for DocuSign customers. The customer could immediately choose the available date and time that worked for them. Time zones were automatically adjusted to avoid accidental 3 a.m. meetings. Customers could reschedule meetings in just a few clicks. And customers connected with the DocuSign customer success team more quickly.

On top of just meeting a surge of demand, one of DocuSign’s main internal goals was to improve time-to-value. “We saw a pretty sizable improvement in how quickly we get in front of the customer once we did switch to Calendly,” said DocuSign’s Vice President of Success at Scale. “The sooner we can get customers up and running and starting to use DocuSign, obviously the greater chance they have of increased usage and retention down the track.” 

Calendly has created a better experience for DocuSign customers and team members alike not only with speed, but also ease of use. With Calendly’s Workflows, DocuSign sends meeting reminders to reduce no-shows, then sends follow-up emails to make sure customers are thanked promptly. Calendly also integrates with DocuSign’s existing tech stack, including Zoom and Google Calendar, providing a user-friendly way to handle external meeting scheduling. 

The smooth scheduling process and improved contact cadence continues to help DocuSign attract and retain customers to this day.

Prioritizing security and control

DocuSign’s top priority is the privacy and security of their customers’ information, documents, and data, leading the industry in defining and delivering the most secure e-signature solution available. 

As the scheduling automation platform of choice for more than 20 million users worldwide, Calendly understands the critical role security, privacy, and compliance play in this process.

Calendly’s enterprise-grade security features keep DocuSign secure through domain control, SAML single sign-on, advanced user provisioning, and alignment with data compliance standards and regulations.

DocuSign has the in-app security, compliance, and centralized admin controls they need today — and the assurance that Calendly’s committed security resources will keep pace with tomorrow’s evolving threats. 

Adding flexibility to the customer journey

Not all scheduling automation tools can support complex meeting scenarios like large onboarding sessions and meetings scheduled across a pool of consultants. DocuSign team members need to schedule many different types of meetings during the customer journey, and their team considered several scenarios before piloting a scheduling tool. 

Fortunately, Calendly offers a variety of team scheduling options for every type of meeting. 

DocuSign uses Calendly’s Round Robin feature to automatically distribute new meetings to team members, saving the time of manually assigning them.

With Round Robin, users choose which team members a meeting can be assigned to. Calendly looks at the availability of every eligible team member and assigns the meeting to a rotating host based on customizable event logic. Optimize for:

• Availability: Assign the meeting to the next available person to reduce wait times.

• Priorities: When more than one person is available, prioritize which team member will take the meeting.

• Equal distribution: Spread meetings evenly among team members to avoid overloading one person.

When multiple DocuSign team members need to co-host a meeting, it’s time for a Collective meeting. These automatically pool the availability of everyone in a group, so the invitee can only select meeting times that are open on every host’s calendar.

And when DocuSign needs to host a webinar or onboard large audiences, Calendly's Group meetings let multiple people sign up to meet with the host at the same time. 

These flexible scheduling options help their customer success team schedule meetings faster, so customers in turn experience the value of the DocuSign product more quickly.

Results

Since adopting Calendly, the DocuSign team has connected with customers more quickly, increased renewal rates, and improved time-to-value for customers — all of which has a positive impact on DocuSign’s bottom line. 

DocuSign’s Vice President of Success at Scale said that Calendly has reduced the time it takes to schedule each meeting from a couple of hours to under 15 minutes. “We have seen over time an improvement in the billable utilization of consultants,” they said. “I’d say it probably increased even up to 20%, with 50% of that attributable to Calendly.” With billable utilization referring to the percentage of available hours spent on billable work.

DocuSign was one of four companies reviewed by Forrester Consulting as part of a 2023 Total Economic Impact™ study commissioned by Calendly. The study, based on customer interviews, data collection, and financial analysis, found that Calendly provided an ROI of 318% over three years.

Over a three-year investment in Calendly, results for the composite organization also include: 

• 1.5% improvement in renewal rate

• Annual profit increase of $180K from higher renewal rate due to improved customer interaction

• $687K in net present value (NPV)

• 10 to 15 minutes saved per meeting

As DocuSign continues to transform electronic signatures and contract lifecycle management, Calendly is proud to be an essential part of retaining and delighting DocuSign customers.

Ready to explore what Calendly can do for your bottom line? Contact our Sales team today.