It's All About the Workflow Fax

Due to the nuances of a particular deal I was recently working, I needed to send a lot of faxes – forms, followed by more forms, followed by still more forms. Over the course of several weeks, I came away from the experience amazed at the level of pain involved. Fax was, of course, a precursor to the whole near-real-time experience we enjoy today via e-mail and Instant Messaging. It offered the ability early on to send, store, forward and update documents; that same technology today is all around us.

When I was at the phone company back in the 90s, I was often surprised to find that customers with Centrex had opted for local business lines for their fax machines; this, despite the fact that over 70 percent of the faxes they sent were internal. Unfortunately for me, though, for what I was doing the use of a centralized system was not available to me. I needed to print the fax form and send the fax out from a machine, only to have the receiving party tell me they had not received the fax and thus necessitate that I repeat the entire process. And this was not only annoying – and believe-you-me, it was that – but more importantly it jeopardized the closing dates for the deal. It isn’t as though some of the PDF strategies aimed at replacing fax and paper would’ve helped, though -- at its heart -- the problem is how to further engage the user.

It is interesting to note that at a corporate level, many of the issues I dealt with would have been easily resolved through the use of a centralized fax server, as such systems handle much of the workflow effort and thus greatly reduce the opportunity for human error. The folks I sent the faxes to seem to not have such a device in place, however, and often they would think the first set of faxes was incomplete (which required that I refer them to other faxes I had sent). Benefits abound with centralized fax servers, not only in how they extend the sharing of resources and workflow but also in the way they help manage the cost of communications.

David Tincher, senior product manager at MultiTech Systems and I will be participating in a webinar, “Evolve Your Fax Operation and Slash Costs” to go over this exact topic. Now I would tell you to fax your registration in, but to ensure a smooth sign-up experience I ask you to fill out the online form.