How to Use Mobile-Friendly Contracts to Capture Acceptance

There isn’t much a mobile device can’t do these days. They are basically miniature computers. People live their lives from their smartphones, and they can do just about anything. They may be shopping for groceries, buying insurance, or even registering to vote. All of this can be done from the convenience of a smartphone, and mobile-friendly contracts let your company do business with customers where they are—their phone or tablet.

If your company’s sales processes are mobile-friendly or you use a mobile-first platform, you need to make the contract acceptance stage easy for the consumer. This includes providing contracts they can accept via text message, over Slack, or in-app. It is especially important that your contract acceptance methods can be tracked in case you need to enforce them in court.

While you may spend a great deal of time on your computer during the workday, this doesn’t mean your customers do the same. Traditional contract methods typically require the use of a laptop or desktop computer. It meant the customer had to navigate through the document, figure out how to sign it with a digital signature tool, or even print the document and use a wet signature. This method is slow, impractical, and even inconvenient enough to disrupt a purchase and cost your business sales.

Instead, modern companies should use mobile-friendly contracts where customers spend their time: on their mobile devices. When your contracts are easy-to-use on these mobile devices, you can retain customers and capture acceptance. You can collect their signature without disrupting their day.

B2C sales

Mobile-friendly contracts are especially crucial in B2C sales. As customers increasingly prefer smartphones to computers to perform tasks, companies have often struggled to keep up. This is especially true for younger customers who have grown up with smart devices readily available. According to PR Newswire, 84% of 18-to-29-year-olds and 78% of 30-to-44-year-olds say they prefer using a mobile device while shopping online. Customers continually expect more of their daily tasks to be manageable through their smart devices.

Companies that fail to adapt to this reality commonly face a different reality—lost business. When a website or app is difficult to use, customers move on. Mobile-friendly contracts increase customer retention by making the process easy. Your business gains the sale, and contract acceptance is automatically captured in the Contract Data Repository. This location stores each contract and analyzes important metadata, like who signed the agreement and when.

As DoorDash became increasingly popular, the demand for their services skyrocketed. The company needed to scale its operation and bring on large volumes of vendors all at once. The company discovered that onboarding agreements were derailing the sales cycle—resulting in lost deals and lost revenue. Why? Restaurant professionals and managers don’t spend time at their desks. They are on the restaurant floor and working hard to get things done. What they do have on them at all times: their phones.

DoorDash then implemented mobile-friendly contracts that allowed restaurant managers to sign directly from their smartphones. The signee is now sent a contract by text message or email, and they can sign it at their convenience. The DoorDash team no longer needs to manually process each one, as the digital contracting software captures acceptance and stores this information automatically.

When you design your sales process, you need to keep the customer in mind at all times. The number of steps they have to complete to purchase the product will make a big difference. The more required steps, the more frustrated a customer is likely to become. They will become unsatisfied with the purchase experience and may abandon it. In fact, three out of four customers say they are willing to switch to a competitor when they feel inconvenienced.

The best time to close a deal or sale is when the customer first expresses their interest. A lengthy purchase process is a sales killer. As soon as your process loses their attention, the likelihood of completing the transaction goes down. Apps that are hard to use on mobile devices are commonly why a sale falls through. 

This is where text messages and other contract acceptance methods are useful. Mobile delivery of a contract is instant, and it can happen as long as the customer has their phone in their hand. Generally, there are three ways to collect acceptance with a mobile device:

• Clickwrap: The contract is accepted when the customer clicks a box that says “Accept” or “I agree.” This is an especially easy-to-use acceptance method for online contracts.
• Text messages: The customer can respond to a text message with “agree” or “accept.”
• Embedded signing: Embedded signing or API signing allows users to accept signature requests on the website or app, usually embedded via JavaScript.

Mobile-friendly contracts are an easy way to enhance the consumer experience. However, many companies hesitate and question whether these digital acceptance methods are legally enforceable. They wonder, “Can the same app I use to sell my product also create a legally binding agreement?” The answer is yes.

The ESIGN Act and UETA have a major impact on electronic signatures and digital contracting. Both laws protect the enforceability and validity of digital signatures when all of the requirements are met. The ESIGN Act, signed in 2000, has helped companies create mobile-friendly agreements that are enforceable and legally binding. It no longer requires a physical signature but instead defines a signature as “any electronic sound, symbol, or process” that could be “logically associated” with a contract. This broad definition permits many different processes to qualify as binding signatures.

The UETA is state law and provides additional protections to electronic signatures. These protections include:

• A contract cannot be deemed unenforceable simply because it is electronic.
• A signature cannot be denied validity just because it is an electronic signature.
• When a law requires a signature, an electronic signature is valid.
• When a law requires a document to be in writing to be enforceable, an electronic document satisfies that legal requirement.

To create a mobile-friendly contract, you need to decide which contract acceptance method is best for your situation. Should you use a contract hosted at a dedicated link? Present it via text message? Include it within the checkout flow of your ecommerce site? When is esignature a more feasible option? To answer these questions, consider the following factors:

• How many times will the contract be signed in a year?
• Will the agreement be identical each time (standardized), or will the terms change frequently?
• What is the value of each agreement? Will it require negotiation and redlining, or is it a “take it or leave it” situation?
• Would your business benefit from contract acceptance within the website or mobile app?
• Will the volume of the agreement be prohibitive for methods like eSignature? Would easier methods like clickwrap be better?

Once you’ve chosen the right option and created an enforceable contract, you need to retain accurate records of each acceptance. The right software can automatically capture acceptance when it occurs. For example, if you use a clickwrap agreement in your app, the digital contracting software can track and store information like:

• The version of the contract signed
• The time it was signed
• What the screen looked like at the time of acceptance
• Identifying information of the party who signed the contract
• The sequence the customer followed to accept the agreement
• Back-end records of contract acceptance

All of this information and more can be collected automatically by contract lifecycle management software. This makes your mobile-friendly contract friendly to your record-keeping as well. Accurate records are a must if you ever need to enforce an agreement.

Mobile-friendly contracts meet the customer where they are. You want to make it as easy as possible to use, all while protecting your company’s rights. The right agreement fosters a convenient customer experience and creates an enforceable contract with an all-in-one solution. You can then track acceptance and gather data with robust analytics to guide mobile-friendly initiatives.