I’m at the end of my rope at this point, every corner I turn DocuSign finds new ways to frustrate my efforts to use their product.  My frustrations are as both a receiver and sender.

I am a subcontractor and I receive about 150-200 DocuSign Envelopes per year and about once a year we will try to bulk send documents to 50-60 employees, for signature.  

The single most annoying aspect as a envelope consumer; there’s no ability for me to Tag or annotate for internal use only what an envelope is.  I receive many docusigns that have subjects “Please Sign Docusign 180005220B003” and at any given time I may have 3-4 of similar looking envelope titles from the same client in various stages of review and execution.  So I either need to memorize that 180005220B003 = “5th St Lobby Phase 1 Contract” or I need to go through each one envelope in the queue looking for the correct one.   Then there are the little issues like the forever bug where if I after completing a envelope if I tried to move it to a folder it would fail, I’d have to go back to the inbox and them move it (this was recently fixed after 3 years of hating docusign).  Or the fact that I get the dashboard when I log in and every time I have to click to go to my inbox because even if the envelope is visible on the dashboard, the options I need inevitably are not available there.

All this pales in comparison to the frustration as a envelope sender.  As mentioned above we send very few envelopes per year but when I do they’re usually a bulk send to employees for a policy change.  The first time I did this I signed up for DS then upgraded my plan to be able to send bulk, was kind of taken back when I was hit with an absurd overage charge but at least it mostly worked (the interface was a little frustrating).  For cost purposes we cancelled the docusign. Fast forward after testing a competing service that was much cheaper and easier to do a bulk send, it was noticed that service was often caught by the receivers spam filter, so back to DS we come.

What I’ve dealt with since coming back is astonishingly frustrating.  Starting with trying to figure out the cost of bulk sending.  There’s no concise information on the DS website that says “if you’re on this monthly plan, it includes x envelopes per month, if you go over that, it’s $x.xx per envelope” Instead you get a If you’re on Business Pro, you get 100 envelopes per year, and it’s $4.50/env “subscribe and save” or $5.50.  Ok, so I’ll chat up sales.

10 minutes dealing with the chat bot asking individual questions like “What is your first name what is your last name, hwat is your email” even though I’m already logged in...then finally a “hi I’m so and so, I’ll be helping you here are some platitudes about customer service to placate you while I’m overworked tasked with helping 12 people at the same time”  After 20 minutes I am finally told that I need to speak to a docusign sales specialist if I want to know the cost for bulk sending.  So now I schedule them to call me the NEXT DAY.  I then have to fill out an email explaining what my business is like and wait.  Next day they call, I explain I just need to bulk send once a year, they explain the costs that I’d get about 8.333 envelopes per month before I pay the overage (they were not very clear).  I ask them “ok great, can you sign me up and enable bulk send” and the answer was “Oh the website is self serve”.  

Fast forward a week, I’m on vacation and checking emails I say, lets try to get this sent out.  Log-in, signup for the pro plan again, try to send an envelope, not showing my plan status, keeps trying to sign me up.  wait 5 minutes, still showing me as non-paid, wait 10, close the computer walk away.  Next day log in, finally shows me as a paid customer, create a template, try to find bulk send, no bulk send.  Try searching, no luck how to enable.  Try googling, no help.  I’m not dealing with this, close the computer.  Fast forward to this week.

Log in, take a good look at the interface, bulk send is not there.  go into the admin panel, find the permissions, DS Admin has bulk send, DS sender doesn’t.  I can’t edit them, I can’t even tell if those users represent me or something else.  Google some more, no help. 

Hit up the chat bot, from the first “how do I enable bulk send” wasted 5-6 minutes of it asking me if I want to know how to send an envelope.  Finally ask for a representative, wait 9 minutes to be connected to a live(ish) person who is obviously dealing with more than one customer (at least I hope they were otherwise wow), 5 minutes of platitudes about customer service and asking me if it’s ok for them to take 2-3 minute to answer.  I explain I’m frustrated I just want to enable bulk send, 3 minutes go by and they respond they’re going to help me.  about 23 minutes into this I get an email asking for permission to enable bulk sending on my account.  I then ask why do I need to give authorization, the answer was “to enable bulk sending”, yes I get that, but am I changing terms, agreeing to additional costs, no just part of the process. Authorized.  Then another 5-6 minutes go by and I’m instructed to log off and wait ten minutes to log back in. 

I log off and after about 5 minutes they ask “is there anything else they can help with” I say no “I’m just waiting the ten minutes” they say “I didn’t mean for you to wait with me” and I response “well I did, it took almost 15 minutes to get to you, if something is wrong I’m not waiting another 15 minutes just to get someone to ask me to give them another 2-3 minutes to look at my account. They agree to wait.  11 minutes go by, log back in open the template, no option to send bulk.  No option next to the template, no option under advanced options.

I let the CS rep know, waiting for them I poke around, I open an old bulk send template from a previous year.  Bulk send is available.  Apparently since I created the template before bulk send was enabled, I can’t enable it in the template, I’ll have to recreate.

In short it took about 20 hours to find out that there’s no clear cut answer to what it will cost me to send 50 envelopes from a business pro plan, that the sales call I was told was required wasn’t.  Then after two weeks of frustration it took 1:37 minutes to get bulk send enabled because NOTHING in the docusign help system says you have to contact support to enable sending (at least the search and chat bot could not find it for me).

This says nothing about the fact that as a business pro user, I not only get to pay a larger monthly fee, but somehow by being a higher tier customer, I get to pay MORE per additional envelope than a standard user does!  Someone please make all this make sense.

I could go on but by now you either stopped reading or you’re clearly sympathizing with me.

So how do you guys deal with all the flaws, faults, bugs and frustrations?

TLDR; DS is the most frustrating online product I deal with