In most companies, government agencies, medical facilities and other organizations substantial numbers of documents and records are transmitted by fax. The ability to receive faxes digitally plays a key part in improving the efficiency of the fax communication and allowing the organization to benefit from the advantages gained through automating its workflows. This is especially true for orders or contractual documents received via fax from customers – processes which have a direct impact on the development of the business and its turnover.
These sectors benefit from a digital fax process
Here are some examples of sectors which can benefit distinctly from digital workflows, since inbound faxes commonly play a role in critical business processes in both B2B and B2C communication:
- Banks receive time-critical banking instructions, securities orders or incoming applications from their customers.
- Insurance companies receive contractual documents from customers and multi-page documents from lawyers, expert assessors and authorities.
- Automotive and manufacturing industries: Here the focus is mainly on inbound orders, order confirmations, delivery confirmations and transactional documents along the entire supply chain.
- Hospitals receive medical examination results and specialist referrals, which have been prepared and sent by doctors’ practices and medical centers.
- Pharmaceutical companies receive orders from pharmacies by way of fax.
- Utility companies receive customer faxes to update addresses, master data and bank details, as well as to cancel the contract.
Processes and workflows generate high fax volumes
It’s self-evident that in the age of digitalization, inbound fax documents also need to be available in digital form – whether they need to be forwarded efficiently to external stakeholders in line with company workflows, fed straight into business applications or made available for intelligent archiving of the faxes in a digital archive.
To facilitate efficient processes and wide-ranging automation of workflows, even with high fax volumes, fax processes have to be digitalized and the entire communication ideally needs to be processed using a cloud-based infrastructure. This enables the digital reception of faxes directly at the employee’s desk in their inbox or, if preferred, in defined shared inboxes with dedicated access rights for the team.
This allows state-of-the-art, cloud-based fax infrastructures to benefit effectively from their valuable advantages over on-prem fax servers. These range from virtually unlimited scalability to a transparent, use-based pricing model and reliable, enterprise-level reporting.
Cloud fax overcomes media breaks and disruption
With the acclaimed Retarus Cloud Fax Services companies and their employees send and receive faxes fully digitally in their usual email application and on every connected end device, no matter whether it’s on the office PC or remotely by way of laptop, smartphone or tablet.
Alternatively, the highly scalable fax infrastructure also enables the incoming faxes and the data extracted from them to be transferred directly to business applications and systems such as ERP, DMS and CRM. The digital faxes and data are thus immediately available for internal workflows and further processing downstream without any media breaks or circuitous routing. In addition, the redundant connection to multiple data centers ensures a high degree of failure safety for the fax communication.
Especially when it comes to optimizing the way in which a company receives faxes, cloud fax offers a whole raft of other value-adding services, above all barcode reading and OCR text recognition. These features can be utilized, for instance, to route fax documents, along with the automatically extracted data, to the right destination within the company.
Automated fax reception and digital processing: Find out more about digital fax workflows with Retarus on our website.
Would you like to optimize the fax communication at your company? Highly scalable, reliable and with exceptional service? Then get in touch now with your local Retarus representative.
