Choosing the Right Fax Solution

There are a plethora of fax products on the market. How do you choose what can work for your business? 

It’s definitely time to shift away from traditional fax machines and toward fax servers. Hopefully, the thermal paper and toner is long gone, but if you are still walking over to the fax machine and waiting in line to send or receive a fax, shuffling through other people’s faxes that have arrived to find your confidential document, or waiting for a busy signal to clear, you need to rethink the cost of your existing fax machine in both dollars and productivity to your business. 

It’s time to put a fax server in to action and save some trees.

In making this shift, you will want to take into account several factors. Start by asking yourself the following questions.

Six Considerations to Help You Select a Fax Solution

1.  What volume of communication does your business do by fax? On average how many faxes come in each day? How many faxes go out each day?

2.  What degree of confidentiality is required in your business? Would it benefit you to have incoming faxes coming directly to the person to whom they are intended or is it sufficient to have all faxes come to one person and then be distributed to their final destination?

3.  Do you typically need to make copies of faxes to forward to other parties, in or outside of your business?

4.  How do you store and file copies of faxes that you need to keep for longer periods of time?

5.  What needs do you have for sending outgoing faxes? Are they typically sent to an individual or do you have a need to send to groups of people at one time?

6.  Would your business benefit from an automated ability to send a fax response based on a telephone inquiry [e.g. someone calls your business for product or service information and by entering their fax number can receive a fax of your brochure or product brief.]?

By answering these questions, you can begin the process of discerning what fax solution may be right for your business. A good resource to tap is your phone system provider who can guide you to appropriate solutions that take advantage of your existing communications infrastructure and integrate adequately with your phone system. Updating your fax solution can lead to ultimate savings in cost and gains in productivity. Contact Alternate Access to see what solution best fits your business!

 

Resources