JAXFCU Delights Members with a Professional and Mobile-Friendly Signing Experience

Community financial institutions are well-known for providing superior service and establishing close-knit relationships with their members and customers. But the bar for what constitutes an outstanding experience is rising – competitive pressures, an acceleration of mobile adoption during the pandemic and changing demographics have raised the stakes for financial institutions to deliver a great digital and mobile-friendly experience.

As consumer expectations evolve to embrace on-the-go, anytime/anywhere accessibility, banks and credit unions must adapt to meet these needs. Fortunately, the right technology will enhance, not replace, the traditional financial relationship and create a better client experience.

Jax Federal Credit Union was facing just this challenge in 2020. Confronted with a pandemic crisis along with the perennial challenges of hurricane season, JAXFCU needed to implement new ways of engaging its members through real-time communication and on-demand delivery of critical agreements and documents. With the help of DocuSign, the credit union was able to meet these challenges head on and exceed its members’ high expectations.

Consumers embrace digital, mobile and text communication

According to a recent customer survey by JP Morgan, 4 out of 5 Chase customers prefer to manage their money digitally. Agreements, including those needed for deposit account opening, account changes and consumer loans represent some of the key interactions between a financial institution and its clients, and they’re ripe for digital transformation.

With the built-in features of the DocuSign Agreement Cloud, banks and credit unions can make these interactions mobile-friendly, fast and easy to complete. Here’s how DocuSign can drive a better signer experience:

• SMS delivery and drawing: With eSignature SMS delivery, you can reach signers instantly with real-time text notifications sent directly to their mobile device. This allows the member or customer to quickly open and electronically sign documents virtually  wherever they are. You can also easily add a drawing field to a document, enabling a sender or signer to upload an image directly within the document and leave free-form markups on the image. This centralizes document review and minimizes unnecessary back and forth.
• Responsive signing and smart sections: Responsive signing enhances mobile readability by adapting forms to the specific dimensions of the user’s device, while smart sections collapse lengthy documents – like terms and conditions – into digestible sections. Responsive signing automatically converts documents to HTML, so that the document will adapt to the size and orientation of the signer’s device. This makes it incredibly easy for signers to review the agreement, as they will no longer need to pinch and zoom around a static, shrunken-down PDF.
• Branding: Branding allows both senders and recipients to customize the DocuSign experience for a distinctive and professional aesthetic. With DocuSign’s embedded branding controls, eSignature account administrators can reinforce your brand presence and reassure signers that documents are coming from your organization. The branding configurations you specify are global and apply to all users and every envelope sent from your account.

Facing multiple stormfronts, JAXFCU buttresses its digital communication

Based in northeast Florida, Jax Federal Credit Union has been using DocuSign for the past 10 years. JAXFCU began by deploying DocuSign eSignature in lending, before branching out into other use cases including account opening, contact center interactions and internal employee onboarding. JAXFCU considers DocuSign a crucial piece of its technology ecosystem and vets every new vendor for DocuSign integration capabilities.

“We use DocuSign day in and day out,” says Jill Thomas-Aviles, vice president of payments and deposit operations at JAXFCU. “All of our vendors integrate with DocuSign, which is definitely a vital partner for us in terms of integrations and functionality.”

Headquartered in hurricane-prone Jacksonville, Florida, JAXFCU has long relied on various means of communicating urgent updates like branch closures to its members. More recently, JAXFCU noticed that members were increasingly engaging with the credit union digitally and on their mobile devices – even while physically in the branch – and therefore sought out ways to enhance their digital experience.

For one, JAXFCU leveraged DocuSign’s branding feature to customize its communications and make them distinctly theirs. “It just looks like us, it feels like us,” Thomas-Aviles says. “When we rolled it out, our chief marketing officer was ecstatic because it was just another way to make it more of ours.”

The credit union also deployed mobile responsive signing to enhance readability and eliminate “pinch and zoom” across a range of agreements, from loan closings to account openings and contact center change requests.

“We often would have members sitting in the branch,” Thomas-Aviles says. “And although they could sign in the branch, sometimes they would find it easier just to do it on their device. They would be pinching and turning trying to read the disclosure; we wanted them to be able to look at those thoroughly.”

According to Thomas-Aviles, the flexibility of responsive signing has been a revelation for JAXFCU and its members. “They absolutely love it! It’s nice that we can roll something out for them that can make us look forward-thinking.”

Last year, as the global pandemic forced branch closures and service reductions and heightened JAXFCU’s sense of urgency around maintaining real-time communication with its members, the organization began exploring innovative ways to respond to queries, provide important information and reach members faster.

SMS delivery was a perfect fit for these goals, and Thomas-Aviles was excited to learn that DocuSign already offered a compelling text messaging solution. The credit union introduced the service in February 2021, and JAXFCU’s associates were thrilled because they knew it was a feature their members wanted.

“Most consumers these days just expect text to be the way business operates,” Thomas-Aviles says, “so that was an awesome enhancement. DocuSign has always been easy, and that’s what we love most about it.”

Want to learn more about building an exceptional mobile and digital experience for your members or customers? Check out DocuSign Digital Day, on demand now.