Docusign’s new streamlined workflows enable faster handoffs and publishing

Introduction

When was the last time you printed something out only to sign it, scan it, and send it back? How about the last time you sent a fax? It is not the 2000s anymore, and Docusign knows it. With a mission to digitize (and modernize) how businesses create, commit to, and manage agreements, Docusign has turned a complex, multistep process into something that works seamlessly just like digital signatures.

To successfully bring document management and signature collection into the 21st century and attract tech-savvy customers, Docusign needed its website to be just as innovative as its offerings. In Docusign's early years, it operated within the confines of a traditional content management system (CMS). Its rigid architecture slowed workflows, limiting productivity. To make things more complicated, Docusign needed another CMS to support each language beyond English, and entering new markets became a time-consuming, resource-heavy project. 

“To help teams move faster, we wanted a tool that would eliminate repetitive, tedious tasks — like inputting SEO metadata or translating content,” Andy Rossi, Engineering Manager at Docusign shared. 

Docusign’s legacy CMS couldn’t keep up with modern business needs, much less help the company scale in the future. The company needed a more flexible tool capable of streamlining content creation and translation, improving efficiency, and helping to deliver personalized digital experiences without technical constraints. 

Driving self-service results with superior digital experiences

After a careful market evaluation, Docusign decided to pilot Contentful. The goal was to develop a marketing website and ecommerce experience with components that could be reused and reconfigured to quickly scale Docusign's content. Creating this content model required close collaboration between the company’s Engineering and Design teams. 

Then, using Contentful’s orchestration capabilities, Docusign established self-service workflows, which enabled the Legal team to update content autonomously, reducing bottlenecks that were common prior to Contentful.

Empowering team members to publish their own content yielded dramatic results. Before Contentful, it took Docusign an average of two weeks to push out more complex core web page updates. 

“After adopting Contentful, the website takes just five minutes to update,” Rossi said. This newly realized opportunity to make incremental changes means Docusign can offer constant improvements for end-users.

Spinning up localized, optimized experiences in seconds, not hours

Another benefit? Docusign can now localize content using the same platform — no additional technology needed. Contentful’s native translation capabilities support multiple locales, allowing the company to easily create and maintain regional domains. Moving into new markets is no longer an arduous, manual process.

“Now it takes just minutes, not hours or days to create a net-new localized experience,” said Rossi. This improvement is allowing Docusign to provide more relevant content to customers while also building stronger emotional connections. With Contentful, Docusign has been able to translate 7,000 pages of its website into 60 languages.

Contentful AI Actions, powered by AWS Bedrock, is another force driving this success. The in-platform, generative AI tool is contextualized with Docusign’s unique business data to help it automate content translation and generate content for SEO, such as meta descriptions, linking structures, and URLs. Marketers are even leveraging the tool to create first drafts of content.

“In an AI-filled world, it's really important to give your team a framework for utilizing these tools — not only does this help them feel more comfortable working with them, but it ensures the output aligns with your strategy. AI Actions enables that,” Rossi shared.

Personalizing content for every market — with no extra work

After laying the foundation for a localized, scalable digital experience complete with ecommerce capabilities, Docusign was able to give its full attention to creating more meaningful customer experiences by personalizing key pages of its website. 

“Originally, we were building our own personalization tool — until we noticed others were offering more advanced solutions than we could develop in-house. Transitioning to Contentful Personalization was very smooth, as we were already thinking about how to utilize its capabilities,” said Michael Luzmore, Product Manager at Docusign.

Contentful Personalization’s rich experimentation capabilities also allowed Rossi, Luzmore, and the team to experiment with how content performed to optimize engagement. With a team of three, they were able to run personalized home page experiences for 20 different audience segments — based on a visitor's profession and the industry they are in — and they were able to do it quickly, and without developer support. And Docusign is just getting started — in the near future, they plan to extend personalized content to every market Docusign serves.

“The insights that Contentful Personalization gives us about our audience are critical for evaluating new opportunities. We’re getting more out of it than past analytics tools, and the suggestions it provides help inspire new ideas for personalized experiences,” Luzmore shared. 

“We've been impressed with Contentful Personalization. We’re constantly reevaluating what we really need in our stack as we learn more and do more with the tool.”

Just as Docusign changed how users interact with previously physical documents, Contentful revolutionized how Docusign’s teams work with digital content. And that is a change that will deliver results now and into the future.