You may believe that the fax machine is obsolete, but there are 43 million fax machines in use today. Thousands of doctor’s offices, hospitals, insurance carriers, and more all have faxes busy at work every day. In England, the nation’s National Health Service maintains more than 8,000 separate fax units at any given time. Millions of new fax machines are purchased each year and 17 billion faxes are sent annually. This has led some to claim that “faxing will outlive us all.”
But faxing technology has changed, and radically so over the past decade. Like most industries, faxing has been widely affected by cloud technologies. Today, online fax services bring together this effective technology into the cloud. There are many online fax services out there now, but what are the benefits, and what sets certain providers apart as best in class? We have answers.
Benefits of Online Fax Services
Fax service is still used all over the world in all kinds of industries. Far from being just a nostalgic technology, today, millions of faxes are sent. In many instances, these services have moved online and grown much more sophisticated over time. Some of the benefits of the best online fax services include:
- Saving on paper and the costs of maintaining a fax machine.
- Being environmentally friendly; no paper means a lower carbon footprint.
- Not being tied to a physical office to send and receive fax communications.
- Organizing all of your faxes via tagging systems, allowing for easy storage and retrieval.
- Signing, sending, and storing documents electronically without wasted space or lost time tracking down physical documents.
- Being easy to set up and even easier to use, including advanced features.
- Having data typically encrypted to ensure security for both the sender and receiver.
- Letting you tack on a local fax number without buying a new phone line.
The best online fax services are fully compliant with HIPAA, GDPR, or other industry-specific privacy rules. This is important to keep track of because these rules constantly evolve. Your online fax provider is responsible for following all of these rules for keeping your customer data safe, not you. Consider how secure on-premise traditional paper fax is; sensitive data can sit out on the fax machine where anyone could walk by. An online fax service encrypts the data so that only the sender and receiver have the keys to read the documents that are sent.
Virtual faxing also keeps documents stored in the cloud for added security. A paper file can be stolen, but online virtual faxes can be stored and maintained with the latest in security protocols. This allows for greater flexibility and scalability; you can add dozens of fax lines virtually without the on-premise costs of purchasing a fax, paper, and the landlines to receive documents. This makes online fax services particularly efficient for small businesses that don’t have the extra money to throw around.
Specifically from the perspective of these small companies, are there features of the best online fax services that you should look for?
Features of the Best Online Fax Service for Small Business
Online fax service companies treat every fax as an electronic transmission. This means you will receive faxes as an image or a PDF attached to an email. These technologies use the internet and eliminate your need for landlines and paper documents. Choosing the best online fax service for small business requires you to make changes to your daily workflows, but making this transition saves small businesses time and money. If you’re considering this type of service, here are a few considerations for picking your online fax service:
- Consider the monthly number of faxes you sent and receive. Typically, service providers set a number of free faxes and then increase your rate plan by the volume of faxing activity.
- If you’re faxing overseas, determine which vendors are the most cost effective for the areas you fax to.
- Think about any special needs you might have. For example, do you fax frequently to a provider that requires you to manually punch in an extension?
Consider the functionality and features of your online fax service provider. Cloud faxing is much more than simple document sharing. Online faxing lets you use email or a text to send a document or lets you fax right from commonly used email services like Gmail—and more. Some of the best features for a small business to consider when looking at virtual fax include:
- Digital signatures are incredibly time efficient. If you’ve picked up a document off the fax, then had to track down a live human to sign off, then gone back to fax—and possibly waited on a busy signal, you know the pain of manual signatures. Digital signatures let you drop in a signature to an electronic document, or you can sign with a touch screen on your mobile device. It’s fast, secure, and eliminates a number of steps from a permissions-based workflow.
- Group delivery, sometimes known as a fax blast, lets you send a fax document to a large number of recipients simultaneously. If you have a manual fax in your office, you know exactly how much time this could save. No more standing and waiting for the fax to go through, then punching in the next number on your list.
- Scheduled delivery allows you to work ahead by uploading a fax, then scheduling in advance when and where the document will go. This lets you send out a document early the next morning before you arrive in the office. Or if you’re out of the office, no problem, the fax will still arrive. This means you can communicate across time zones while staying massively productive and efficient. Say you want a fax to arrive in an office in a different time zone on a specific day, when you know your target audience will be there. No problem with scheduled delivery. Your fax will arrive right on time.
While these are just a few of the benefits of the best online fax service for small business, these tools offer many more options that could fit your goals.
Why Online Fax Services are a Good Option
Faxing is far from obsolete. The persistence of this technology comes in part because the fax industry adapted their services to the cloud. Increasingly, companies are shifting from traditional on-premise faxing to online fax service. Infinite Connect offers online faxing as just one of the services we offer. As an integrated communications provider, we make use of the cloud to benefit your voice, email, text, instant message, faxing—and more. Talk with our team to explore what’s next for your business.