Acclaris Sees Benefits from both Hosted and Premises-Based Fax Solutions

By utilizing Biscom’s hybrid fax solutions (the combination of both fax servers and hosted fax services), Acclaris achieved complete business continuity—ensuring that users can send and receive faxes at all times, regardless of whether the fax server is down for maintenance or peak fax traffic exceeds the available bandwidth.

About Acclaris

Acclaris is the leading software enabled service provider for employee benefits reimbursement. Their end-to-end solution enables its customers’ employees to submit, get approval and payment of reimbursement requests for various different benefit plans including healthcare, dependent care, HRA, HSA and tuition/adoption assistance expenses. Acclaris is not limited to any particular type of benefits plan or reimbursement system, and offers a high-tech approach that differentiates them from the competition. Expense receipts are faxed mostly from North America by the end users to Acclaris, processed overnight by their service centers, with most reimbursement decisions available within one business day.

The Acclaris system provides images of claim forms and receipts, as well as complete tracking and reporting capabilities to claimants and their employers. The system receives in excess of 5000 fax pages each day. “When fax is such a big part of your business, an improvement in your faxing solution can result in big savings in both time and money,” said Subhadip Chatterjee, VP of Information Technology for Acclaris. With 30,000 customers across North America (many of them Fortune 500 and Fortune 50) Acclaris provides an essential solution for business reimbursements.

The Challenge

Reimbursement accounts invariably require the submission of receipts – lots of receipts! Fax is the simplest and most effective way for end-users to submit these receipts to Acclaris; it’s fast, efficient, secure, and fax service is ubiquitous. Such intense use of fax, however, means that fax reliability is key to Acclaris’ success. “The moment our customers try to fax and get a busy tone, they will pick up the phone to call us,” said Mr. Chatterjee. “This will cost us both time and money.” Acclaris initially installed a fax server solution provided by another vendor, but that implementation proved to be inadequate as the company grew and bottlenecks became a concern. “The previous solution had both software and hardware issues and we began to look for a better solution,” said Mr. Chatterjee.

The new fax solution needed to deliver non-stop business faxing, and provide a high level of security to ensure compliance with HIPAA regulations. When they began the project of upgrading their fax solution, Acclaris looked into solutions from both Biscom and another fax server provider. Overall, it was determined that their best option was Biscom’s award-winning FAXCOM Server supplemented by Biscom’s hosted fax service.

The Solution

Acclaris chose Biscom over the competing vendor for two primary reasons: Biscom’s premises-based FAXCOM fax solutions have long been recognized for their legendary business faxing reliability. And, unlike its competitors, Biscom also offers non-stop hosted business faxing via hosted fax service. Acclaris was able to implement and test the hosted fax service on a small scale at first, then roll the service out to additional users, and finally establish premises-based fax servers as required. Both the FAXCOM Server and Hosted Fax Service look and feel identical to the end-user, and both provide the same extensive faxing functionality. Moreover, by installing a FAXCOM Server on-site and setting up the hosted fax service as an automatic failover backup system, Acclaris was able to ensure that fax traffic would never be interrupted. “A big driver for us is reliability,” said Mr. Chatterjee. “End users need fax and when the fax doesn’t work they send receipts in via postal mail. That results in more work for us and lower customer satisfaction.”

The second reason Acclaris chose Biscom was because Biscom provided a completely integrated solution that included the fax server, the fax cards, the software, and the service – all from one source. The competing solution offered similar functionality and pricing, but Acclaris would have had to build the fax server themselves. Finally, only Biscom was able to provide direct support for both premises-based and hosted faxing from the same vendor – a unique offering in the fax marketplace. Biscom’s combined fax server and hosted fax service solution was the obvious route to take.

The capability to evaluate Biscom’s fax solutions without having to make an investment in hardware or software was also a big factor. “We started with the hosted service and quality was good,” said Mr. Chatterjee. “We then implemented fax servers for our primary business units and confi gured FAXCOM Anywhere as an automatic service rollover for when fax traffic gets high.” Another advantage of working with Biscom has been the world-class service and support for which Biscom is known. “One of the best things about working with Biscom is their troubleshooting and testing support,” enthused Mr. Chatterjee. “When we wanted to set up FAXCOM Anywhere as a failover backup, we were uncertain of the best way in which to test it. Biscom helped us thoroughly test the system. We really liked the fact that they went beyond what was expected of them.”

The Results

Acclaris now has a system to send and receive faxes that provides business continuity. The FAXCOM Server’s award-winning reliability is further supplemented by FAXCOM Anywhere, ensuring that users can always send and receive faxes, regardless of whether the fax server is down for maintenance or peak fax traffic exceeds the available bandwidth. This implementation provides the reliability and availability that Acclaris demands. “Implementing this solution has resulted in big savings in both time and money,” said Mr. Chatterjee. “The more efficient fax is for our end-users, the more they’ll use it and the less they’ll call our support desk.” The solution has also had a significant impact on customer satisfaction levels. For Acclaris, the most important benefit remains reliability. “With Biscom’s hybrid fax offering, you can set it up, forget about it and it keeps working,” says Mr. Chatterjee. “That’s exactly what we were looking for!”