If the last few months have taught us anything, it’s that businesses can suddenly be forced to make dramatic change to their operations—and that those businesses which are either unprepared for these adjustments or not flexible enough to make them—can suffer significant harm. Working out of a home office or remote on a laptop could make it easier, but what if you need to use the fax machine back at the office?
If your business still uses traditional fax infrastructure—desktop fax machines, on-prem fax servers, dedicated fax lines in your offices—you likely found faxing to be one of the most difficult services to transition to WFH for your staff when the pandemic lockdowns went into effect.
Prepare your faxing infrastructure for any disaster… even a government “stay at home” order
Many of the organizations that contacted us after the first states began issuing stay-at-home orders were financial-services firms: brokerage houses, accounting firms, mortgage lenders, and financial planning companies. These organizations were able to equip their quarantined employees to stay connected to each other and accessible to clients—with online chat, video conferencing, and other digital services.
But such a smooth transition wasn’t possible for their faxing operations. These companies realized they’d have to send employees into the office to retrieve and send important faxes. Nor could they work around this challenge, because faxes represent a significant percentage of their firms’ business communications.
This event forced many in the financial-services industry to migrate their fax infrastructure to modern, digital cloud fax technology. But the good news is this technology migration—which takes almost no time or effort, and requires almost no employee training—is far more than a quick-fix for a company suddenly forced to fax from outside the office.
Streamline your faxing operations and improve your business
Digital cloud fax technology can offer enormous operational benefits for financial-services companies—even after the shutdown orders are lifted. Here are just a few examples.
1. Improve your staff’s productivity and mobility
Cloud faxing lets your employees receive, review, annotate, send, and even electronically sign faxes online—all without ever scanning, printing, or holding a piece of paper, or having to stand over an office fax machine.
Instead, your staff can send and receive faxes via email, from a user-friendly website, or even on a mobile app. And with the right cloud fax platform, all these fax transmissions are highly secure.
2. Improve the client experience
Your clients today demand their service providers to be highly responsive. That is one reason traditional faxing creates such a competitive disadvantage for financial-services firms—it is the one communication protocol that still requires an employee to physically retrieve and process a hardcopy document.
With digital cloud fax technology, your staff will receive alerts by email the moment a new fax comes in, so they can immediately review and respond to it. And this can all happen within a cloud app—wherever your employee happens to be. This will allow your company to promise a higher level of client service, even when it comes to responding to faxes.
3. Enhance your regulatory compliance
One reason for fax technology’s incredible staying power in an otherwise paperless, digital world is that financial regulations, such as SOX and GLBA, treat faxing as a secure means of transmitting clients’ personally identifiable information (PII). Unfortunately, however, the way most financial firms set up their fax infrastructure—with desktop fax machines in common areas of the office—those same regulators can easily find compliance violations in how the company protects the PII data it faxes.
The right digital cloud fax platform can bring your firm’s fax processes up to full compliance with SOX, GLBA, and other data privacy laws. Such a solution will use the most advanced encryption technology for your digitally faxed data, both in transit and while at rest in storage. It will also use only the most secure data centers to protect that PII data forever.
Learn how cloud fax improves financial firms’ regulatory position (PDF)
4. Lower your firm’s faxing costs
Lower costs will be yet another benefit of retiring your on-prem fax infrastructure and replacing it with digital cloud fax technology. By outsourcing your entire fax environment to the cloud, you will be able to immediately eliminate costs such as:
- Fax machine ink, paper, and toner
- The costs of maintenance contracts and repair costs for failing fax machines
- Dedicated fax phone lines
- Long-distance phone charges you’re probably incurring from some faxes
- On-prem fax servers and gateway software licenses
You will also be able to redeploy your IT team onto more forward-looking company initiatives because they will no longer need to spend their time responding to paper jams and other fax machine problems.
See how this 29-branch bank lowered its costs with cloud faxing (PDF)
Outsource your firm’s fax infrastructure today
Moving to digital cloud fax technology is a smart move during a lockdown that forces your staff to work from home. But as a longer-term technology decision —to improve your operations, lower your costs, and bring your firm into regulatory compliance—switching to a cloud fax platform is simply brilliant.
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