How reliable is your fax service?

Many business owners do not understand the differences among fax options. When you use a quality fax solution, most of your faxes arrive intact, even large documents.

However, determining whether your fax service is reliable may prove to be a challenge. The decision can be made easier by learning about the most common features of reliable fax services. Continue reading to find out whether you need to upgrade your online faxing.

Signs of a Poor Quality Fax Service

Internet fax typically covers a wide range from fax over IP (FoIP) to cloud fax services. When you find statistics such as a 5% to 8% failure rate for online faxes, that rate will not be the same across all services. In fact, some systems will fail more frequently because of poor quality and inconsistent telecoms. Quality fax services will have much lower failure rates, especially when the proper settings are selected.

Once you're using a cloud fax service, you'll quickly become aware of its quality and any inherent deficiencies. Typically, inferior services face at least some of the following limitations:

Issues sending documents with more than 25 pages

Fax failure rates of 10% or more

Cuts out services like ECM to lower their costs

Low-quality telecom

Inferior quality for faxes sent and received

Mid-transmission cut-offs

How Providers Get Away With Pitiful Fax Services

While such poor quality may seem unconscionable, many companies will choose to pay less or nothing for faxing documents. In return, they get a service that cuts corners on its network and error checking methods. The result of these cost-cutting measures is a low price that also comes with a low-quality fax service.

Basic online fax services can be started by individuals using simple fax servers in their homes. However, as noted, such services do not provide quality faxing, security, or error prevention. For occasional faxing of single pages by individuals, such services may not cause problems. But, for many businesses, fax reliability is critical.

You cannot rely on just any fax service if, for example, you must send medical records to comply with HIPAA regulations. You need one that will encrypt data, provide extra layers of security, and create audit trails. Many low-cost online fax services cannot offer these features due to their reduced quality. When it comes to business faxing, however, you cannot afford the costs incurred on your company by low quality or fax failures.

In the medical industry, for instance, manual processes, such as faxing, can require up to 30 minutes per transaction, costing $6 more compared to electronic options. If a fax fails, workers will need to repeat the transaction, increasing total costs in wasted employee time.

Traits of Top-Quality Cloud Fax Services

When searching for a quality cloud fax service for your business, you need low failure rates. A top-tier service such as mFax has a high percentage of successful transmissions, with a failure rate of well below 3%.

Additionally, these types of services will have ECM enabled. ECM stands for error correction mode. This setting checks packets of fax data. Any group of data not received gets sent again. Even though some users may wish to turn off this setting to speed up faxes and low-quality services may not even offer it, it should remain enabled to ensure high fax success rates. If you have ECM as a feature of your service, it will ensure that your data will carry through without errors.

A good fax service will have multiple carriers to support both inbound and outbound transmissions. For instance, mFax uses up to a dozen carriers and uses an algorithm to select the best for every fax sent or received.

Another characteristic of a good fax service is high-grade security. In the medical industry, up to 75% of communication happens through faxes. The industry's inability to securely send electronic health records in accordance with HIPAA regulations is a major factor contributing to the continued use of faxed documents.

Such businesses can reduce the use of those bulky analog fax machines while at the same time benefit from going paperless by using a reliable electronic fax service that encrypts documents at rest and in transit. Low-cost online fax services may not offer such guarantees of information security. If your business requires document security, choose a reliable online fax service like mFax.

Try Out the Most Reliable Fax Service Today

Stop losing your faxes because of an unreliable cloud fax service.

mFax harnesses its proprietary technology and combines it with top-tier service providers to provide you with a highly reliable fax service with the lowest possible failure rates.

That’s why mFax is consistently ranked as one of the best and most trusted cloud fax providers for businesses. In fact, both business.com and influential entrepreneur Neil Patel picked mFax as “the best online fax service for multiple users.”

‍

Start today with a 14-day free trial to see for yourself why businesses that rely on fax choose and trust mFax.