Enable sending agreement URLs to the recipient's phone

Enable the option to send your recipients their agreement links directly to their smart phones.

Overview

The SMS link notification feature allows for an agreement's URLs to be delivered directly to a recipient's smartphone without requiring them to have to access their email. This is particularly useful when time is a factor and getting a signable document in front of a recipient is urgent.

Enabling the SMS link option for a recipient ensures that all of the signer-related links are delivered directly to the provided phone number, including signing, reminder, and completed agreement links.

SMS links can be delivered in addition to, or in replacement of, the classic email format.

Availability:

SMS link notification is available for enterprise license plans only.

Configuration scope:

The feature can be enabled at the account and group levels.

How it's used

When the SMS link option is enabled, senders have the option to select if they want to send the agreement signing links via e-mail, SMS, or both. If the SMS option is selected, a phone number must be included by the sender.

• If only Email is selected, nothing changes, and the recipient's email is used to deliver the links via email.
• If only SMS is selected, the recipient record updates to accept a phone number. The country code is selectable from the dropdown to the left of the phone number field.
• If both options are selected, the recipient record updates to add an additional field for the phone number (which is required).
• The default record configuration when both email and SMS are available is to have Email enabled and SMS disabled. Senders must explicitly enable SMS every time.

SMS links are configured per recipient.
Ad hoc recipient groups are supported. Each member must be individually configured and all members of the group are notified per their configuration.

Recipients get a short message identifying who sent the agreement, the agreement name, and the link that delivers the signer directly to the agreement e-signing page.
If authentication is configured, the recipient will be required to pass that before being able to interact with the agreement.

Best practices

Enable SMS link notifications if you have an identified business reason. SMS link notifications consume the same premium transactions as Phone authentications, and you'll want to budget for the consumption of these premium transactions.

Pay close attention to your consumption if you are using both SMS link notifications and Phone authentications. Once the transaction pool is depleted, link notification (and phone authentications) will fail, and the agreement process will stall until transactions become available again.

Configuration

The controls for this feature can be assessed by navigating to Send Settings > Send Agreement Notifications through

When the setting is disabled, the recipient record shows that Email is selected, and the ability to manipulate the settings are suppressed.

When the setting is enabled, the sender is given control over how the links are delivered.
By default, Email is selected and SMS is disabled.

Consumption of SMS link notifications

An SMS transaction is consumed when a recipient is first notified about their agreement participation. This one consumed transaction from the SMS pool includes up to three notifications to the recipient:

1. The initial Please Sign message with a link.
2. One Reminder message with a link.
   • Only one Reminder notification is ever sent via SMS. If the recipient is configured to get multiple reminders (e.g., Daily), one reminder will be sent, after which the reminder will be canceled.
3. One Completed Agreement or Delegated message with a link (depending on how the recipient completes their action).

Recipient group members are all notified at the same time. If a recipient group has five members, and three are configured to receive SMS notifications, then three SMS transactions are consumed.

If link expiration is active, and a new link is requested, the new link is delivered without consuming another SMS transaction.

Every reminder configured after the first reminder will be charged one SMS transaction and will send only one SMS link. (e.g., If you configure a weekly reminder, one SMS link will be charged, one SMS link will be sent, and then the reminder will be terminated.) 

Delegation

Delegation of the signature through any method is not supported and will result in the delegated-to recipient getting the links delivered in e-mail form.

 Track available volume

To monitor the volume of SMS transactions available to the account:

• Navigate to Account Settings > Send Settings > Send Agreement Notifications through
• Hover your pointer over the Track Usage link:

Records on the Manage page

When viewing the agreement on the Manage page, the email address (or recipient name) is listed in the Recipients column if the agreement is sent with email enabled.

If only SMS is enabled, the partly masked phone number in the form of an email address is displayed in the Recipients column. (e.g., XXXXXX1212@sms.adobesign.com)

When viewing the individual recipient records (when replacing the recipient or editing the authentication type), the phone number is presented unmasked:

Audit Report and Activity log

The Audit Report and Activity log clearly identify when SMS is used for the initial request for a recipient to sign the document.
The Audit Report will also record reminder events if the group is configured to do so.

• Only the last four digits of the phone number are exposed.