10 business-proven benefits of digital faxing

Security, efficiency, and cost reducing. These are the main factors that are pushing online faxing growth globally. And the future for faxing also looks promising.

According to the IDC’s report “Fax Market Pulse: Trends, Growth, and Opportunities“, from 2017, fax usage was expected to grow 25% year-over-year during 2018 and now in 2019.

And this growth has been even stronger in the most developed economic regions. The report points out that fax usage grew by:

• 51% of North America companies surveyed
• 45% of Western Europe companies surveyed

Not bad for a technology that had its golden days before the rise of email.

A fax a day keeps the lawsuits away

There are three main factors driving companies to adopt digital fax:

1. Fax is a component of business workflows, it is universally accepted, and it is frequently integrated with back-end applications.
2. Fax is evolving and today it’s available through the offer of digital solutions such as fax servers and cloud fax services, which reduce costs and make it easier to use by integrating with email, you can read more about how email to fax works.
3. Fax provides a high level of confidence that a document is sent and received by an auditable trail. It aids business to be compliant with industry regulations such as HIPPA, SOX, and GDPR.

Beyond these main factors, there are other bottlenecks that are motivating businesses to move to online faxing, such as:

• The high cost of paper-based / manual faxing
• Time employees spend sending and receiving paper faxes
• The protection for sensitive documents
• Difficulty in managing fax infrastructure (modems and machines)
• Challenges faced scaling to a high-volume faxing

Digital fax can mitigate them all.

10 business-proven benefits of faxing

Considering all these factors, the IDC report points to ten main benefits that businesses which have already migrated to digital faxing are experiencing. Let’s check them out:

1. Fax is a secure method to exchange information

Traditional fax machines are open doors to leak protected and sensitive documents. Since you cannot create different accounts for different users, you are not able to track who sent what.

Online faxing addresses privacy while integrates directly with third-party applications, such as ERPs, CRMs, and accounting packages.

Once inbound online faxes are routed directly to a location you specify, it’s not possible for someone to pick up a document that was not sent to them by mistake.

Incoming faxes can also be routed directly into selected shares on your network. The same protections you use to secure users’ email and network shares will keep faxes safe too.

2. Fast communications

When you need a signature on paper to receive orders, invoices, and other business-critical documents, nothing beats faxing. The online exchange of business documentation makes faxing as effective as a WhatsApp message, with the advantage of being secure and legally recognized.

3. Prevents errors

Print communication is clearer and registered but can also suffer the effects of outdated and poorly maintained fax machines. It results in poor-quality faxes that can stress your business process. Online faxing mitigates all these risks and delivers outstanding documents easily for being read, ready to be printed with excellent definition, or archived online by a single click.

4. Customer satisfaction

Clear and simple communication is a state of art in the business world, and when you reach this valuable level, all of the process become more efficient. Digital fax dissolves points of friction between your business and your partnerships, driving to better relationships and higher customers satisfaction and retention.

5. Improves business processes

Think about all the time your team might lose doing and redoing business processes, such as calling customers, sending emails, checking low-quality documents, and so on.

Online faxing can kill it all. This way, your team will complete its tasks shorter with just a few touch-points, driving higher satisfaction for all people involved in the process.

6. Reduces business and compliance risk

HIPAA, SOX, GDPR, they are all legal industry regulations that might sink your business profit if you are not compliant. In this case, the fines are costly but complying is cheap.

To stay compliant you must have a solution in place that allows you to exchange all your business documentation in a certified and secure way. The solution must also allow for easy archiving with just a few clicks.

7. Helps push new products/services to market quickly

It’s about the four eyes principle: a requirement that two individuals approve some action before it can be taken. Banks, hospitals and sensitive military areas often request that an order must be signed by two or more executives. Also, some data management systems require that important record updates be approved by two separate people before the data is committed.

8. Saves time and increases productivity

With traditional faxing, people need to stand up, go to the machine and wait for incoming messages or delivery communication. With online faxing, they can send and receive faxes from anywhere with just a couple of clicks.

At larger offices with multiple fax machines, one service will scale to as many users and devices as needed, providing granular access to the fax service in a secure way.

9. Allows focus on valuable activities

When you spend time resolving problems, you lose valuable hours that could be spent on business progress. All businesses have a list of uncompleted tasks waiting to be rescued from the “whenever I find a time” drawer. It’s all about productivity, doing more with less, and digital faxing can help with it.

10. Cost saving / Faster Return on Investment

When you use a clear and reliable channel to communicate, being compliant with all the legal steps, with no noise, you complete all your business processes earlier. You receive, dispatch and ship quicker. As such, you get paid faster. Isn’t this is the dream scenario for every business?

Do you remember the three main benefits that we mentioned in the first line of this article?

Security, efficiency, and cost reducing. This is what digital faxing is all about!

As you can see, digital faxing is a full solution appliance ready to be leveraged for your business.

If you want to explore all these benefits, download your 30-day trial of GFI FaxMaker or GFI FaxMaker Online now.