Large Insurance Agency Solves Cumbersome Fax Challenges by Implementing Biscom’s Hosted Fax Service

"I like Biscom’s Hosted Fax Service, my boss likes it, and other users like it. Overall, we are very happy with the product and the service we’ve received." - Lee Matthews, Systems Administrator, Insurica

When you have 12 separate offices faxing multi-page insurance documents at a rate of about 10,000 pages a month each, tracking all those faxes for charge backs and invoices can become an administrative nightmare. That’s the situation that confronted Lee Matthews, Systems Administrator at INSURICA Insurance Management Network (INSURICA), a privately-held independent insurance agency with over 260 colleagues across 8 states.

“Because of the faxing problems we were experiencing, I was tasked with finding an alternative to our on-premise fax appliance and identifying an innovative solution that met INSURICA’s business needs,” said Matthews. “Realizing our challenges and requirements, I felt it was the perfect opportunity to introduce a hosted fax service because it would be easier to use and manage.”

Before embarking on his search, Lee developed five criteria for evaluating possible solutions:

• Scalability – had to support the entire 260-person organization and have room to grow
• Had to be hosted & managed offsite
• Easy and reliable disaster recovery setup
• 100% guarantee that fax numbers would never ring busy
• Faxes must arrive in searchable PDF format – Mimosa archive held gigabytes of emails & should hold faxes, too – should be able to search everything at once

After evaluating a number of products using these criteria, Matthews determined that Biscom’s Hosted Fax Services met his requirements. “During the research period, I didn’t see any other product that had a complete hosted package for our company,” said Matthews. In addition to product capability, Biscom’s experience and background was an influential factor in moving forward. “I found out Biscom had been in business for more than 23 years and had 3,000+ customers. If those customers trust Biscom, I could trust Biscom, too.”

When learning more about the technical requirements of Biscom’s hosted fax service, Matthews was glad to discover that there weren’t any. No other hardware or equipment was required to use the service – except for Microsoft® Exchange, which INSURICA already used. In fact, Biscom’s Microsoft® Outlook® module meant that none of INSURICA’s users needed to learn a new system; if you’re connected to the email server, you’re connected to Biscom’s hosted fax service.

Matthews was quickly set up with an evaluation to test the service. With some help from Biscom’s customer service team, he easily set up the entire configuration and put it through its paces successfully. “Biscom’s service and support made the install very smooth,” Matthews said. “That was the final decider for me.”

Pleased with the set up and evaluation, Biscom’s hosted service went live at INSURICA’s Oklahoma City headquarters in February of 2010. Soon after, an office in Lawton, Oklahoma, called to report that its fax was broken. “I sent a telephone number to the Lawton office and converted them to Biscom’s fax service right after they forwarded their line, it was very simple and the office was up and running quickly.” Today, three months later, success from the initial Biscom implementation has spurred a plan to replace all existing fax solutions in INSURICA’s remaining offices.

“I like it, my boss likes it, and the other users like it. Overall, we are very happy with the product and the service we’ve received,” said Matthews.