DocuSign dramatically increases publishing speed with Contentful

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. In fact,  the company’s products speak to it. They’ve modernized the physical task of completing paperwork — it can now be done digitally in just a few clicks.

But, as DocuSign disrupted the world of physical document management and signature collection, it was met with the challenge of building digital experiences for its customers and prospects. Internal team members were operating within the confines of a traditional content management system: a technology solution that was more of a problem. It created workflow issues, limiting productivity, and diminishing the time teams had to focus on more creative endeavors. In addition, creating new localized experiences for DocuSign’s various domains required different CMSes, each supporting a single language — developers had to create entirely new systems to launch experiences in rising markets.

Their legacy CMS simply couldn’t keep up with the business needs of today. DocuSign’s teams needed the simplicity, flexibility, and velocity to create and publish content at pace, without the technical constraints posed by their legacy infrastructure. 

Driving self-service results with superior digital experiences

After a careful market evaluation, the DocuSign team chose Contentful to pilot a completely new ecommerce approach led by a cross-functional team. The goal was to develop an ecommerce flow with components that could quickly and easily be scaled and changed. The effort required close communication between the Engineering and Design teams to determine the content models best suited to the task. By the end of the process, the group gained valuable insights into content modeling which would influence their future work.

“It was a successful project,” Senior Product Manager Andy Rossi said. “We were able to develop a really nice ecommerce flow using Contentful, and it was easy to change content around. We did what we wanted to do, and we had a lot of learnings from that.”

With its ecommerce solution in flight, the team moved to migrating DocuSign’s legal pages to Contentful. Thanks to Contentful’s orchestration capabilities, the team was able to establish self-service workflows to allow the Legal team to update their own content without help from developers. That change empowered non-technical team members to take a more active role in content creation and publishing while reducing associated bottlenecks. “We can invite the legal team to create and edit pages while setting rules and permissions that prevent accidental errors,” Rossi said. “All they have to do is focus on their own work. And that's been very successful.”

“Empowering team members to publish their own content has yielded dramatic results. Before Contentful, it took DocuSign an average of two weeks to push out website 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 to  end-uses.

Spinning up localized experiences in seconds, not hours

DocuSign has also benefited from Contentful’s ability to support rapid localization through the App Framework. In its previous CMS, DocuSign was limited to one language per implementation. Contentful’s ability to support multiple locales allowed the team to create dozens of locales and localize content across DocuSign’s various market-specific domains in one motion. Creating a new localized experience takes just minutes, not hours or days. Moving into new markets has gone from an arduous, manual task to a streamlined process that can be accomplished quickly and easily.

“One of our biggest goals was to be able to quickly spin up experiences in new markets. We weren't able to do that before because we were locked, and this is part of our migration. We're able to quickly spin up experiences. We weren't able to do that before,” Rossi said. “It takes just minutes to create a localized experience for a new market.”

With its new ecommerce solution in place, and the ability to quickly spin up localized experiences, DocuSign’s leaders are examining other ways Contentful can change their business for the better. Looking forward, Rossi hopes to build on the success of their marketing site to establish a global taxonomy that can support every type of initiative or experience the company wants to produce.

“There's the marketing site, but then in the future blogs, customer stories, anything that requires search ability and filter ability needs to be managed with one source of truth,” Rossi said. “We've been struggling with that, and that's something I'm really looking forward to executing on.”

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

To learn more about Contentful’s composable content platform, visit Composable Platform.