We dropped DocuSign for client approvals. Our close rate went up.

Last year, a client of ours — a 14-person branding studio in Austin — tracked something interesting. They sent 47 scope confirmations through DocuSign over three months. 11 of them never got signed. Not because the clients disagreed with the scope. Because they couldn't get past the login screen.

One client, a busy marketing director at a mid-size ecommerce company, tried four times. She reset her password twice. The third time, the reset email went to spam. The fourth time she just called the studio owner and said "look, I approve it, just start the work." Which is great for speed and terrible for legal protection.

This isn't an unusual story. I've heard versions of it from at least a dozen agency owners over the past two years. The pattern is always the same: the tool that's supposed to protect them is actually creating risk, because it's so annoying to use that clients bypass it entirely.

DocuSign wasn't built for this. It was built for procurement departments processing vendor agreements with seven-figure liability and six levels of signatory routing. That's a real problem and DocuSign solves it well. But an agency sending a post-call scope summary to a client who signs things three times a year? That's a completely different use case, and the tools should be different too.

The abandonment numbers are worse than most agencies realize. PandaDoc's own user research (published in their 2025 product benchmark report) found that external signers — people who don't have accounts — complete e-signature requests only about 64% of the time on mobile. On desktop it's better, around 82%. But agency clients overwhelmingly open these on their phones, usually while walking to their next meeting.

So what do you do? There are basically four approaches, and I've seen agencies successfully use all of them depending on their client profile.

The first is the structured email reply. You send a clean, bullet-point summary and ask them to reply "approved." It's free. It's fast. It also has no audit trail and falls apart the moment a client says "I never approved that third bullet point." Good for low-stakes projects with trusted clients. Terrible for everything else.

The second is OTP-based sign-off. This is what ClarAccord does. You generate a receipt with the scope, deliverables, budget, and due date. The client gets a 4-digit code sent to their phone or email. They type it in. Done. No account. No password. No login screen. The entire interaction takes under 30 seconds, and the legal record is actually stronger than an e-signature in some ways because there's no account-sharing ambiguity. The timestamp, IP address, and device fingerprint are all captured automatically.

The third is embedded approval. Some tools let you put an inline approve button directly in the email body. The client never leaves their inbox. It's faster than full e-signature flows but still requires the tool to support unauthenticated signers, which many enterprise platforms disable by default for compliance reasons. Worth investigating if you're on a platform that supports it.

The fourth is voice-to-receipt, which is newer and still being adopted. ClarAccord can now take a recording of your client call — or even a WhatsApp voice note — transcribe it, and auto-extract the scope items, dates, and budget into a structured receipt. You review it, tweak if needed, and send. The AI does the heavy lifting of turning "so for this project we'll do the homepage redesign and about page, maybe the contact form too, budget around four five" into discrete, confirmed line items.

The Austin studio I mentioned earlier switched from DocuSign to OTP confirmations about eight months ago. Their average approval cycle went from 2.3 days to just under 4 hours. Their clients stopped asking for password resets. Their project managers stopped spending Tuesday mornings chasing signatures from last week's calls. More importantly, their signed receipt rate went from 74% to 96%. Those 11 abandoned approvals became 2.

The takeaway isn't that DocuSign is bad. It's that the tool should match the workflow. If your clients sign formal contracts regularly, use DocuSign. If they approve scope changes and confirm deliverables three times a year, give them something that takes 30 seconds and doesn't require them to remember a password they set in 2019.