Cut Costs! Use Online Telecom Services – Part 1, Online Fax and PBX

We are starting a new series in our blog entitled “Cut Costs!”  Our aim is to show you how to reduce costs and improve efficiency in your company’s technology budget. This article is part of that new series, and is a two-part article explaining some great ideas for enhancing your telephone system, while lessening the financial burden.

Today we’re going to talk about online faxing and PBX hosting services. First, a little bit of explanation regarding what these services actually are. If you’re a normal business, chances are that you have a fax machine, and maybe a dedicated fax line that you can use to send and receive faxes at will. You might even have a main phone number for your business with extensions that point out to various departments or people. Unfortunately, these systems provide a lot of overhead, and it is time-consuming (and costly) to maintain them. But what if you could outsource all of the equipment and time associated with maintaining these systems- and for only a fraction of the cost? Five or ten years ago, this would be difficult – but today it is routine and just considered to be smart business.

Let’s start with fax lines. A typical fax line costs about $20 per month for standard service. Additionally, a fax machine costs anywhere from $30 to $200. Therefore, the cost of maintaining a fax line is about $340 per year, when including the cost of the line, equipment replacement and maintenance. On the other hand, an online service costs about $95 per year for the same capabilities.

An online fax service typically includes a log-in screen which takes you to a homepage, which looks just like a webmail service. You can view incoming faxes and download or print what was sent to you; you can also create new faxes with cover sheets and attach documents from your computer (or scans if it is a hand-written document). In most cases, you can also configure the service to notify you via e-mail or SMS when you receive faxes as well as allow you to send faxes via e-mail. It’s easy, convenient and most importantly, inexpensive. There’s no need to worry about re-sending faxes to busy phone lines (the system will automatically re-attempt as many times as you wish). Power and telephone outages won’t disrupt your fax system at all. Best of all, you don’t even need to be in the office to work with your fax system.

To take things a step further, you can also host your entire phone system online. Many companies offer “Virtual PBX” services that allow callers to contact you via a local or 800 number (and more than one number if you wish), hear a custom greeting, access extensions, voicemail, and even added services such as company directories. In many cases, these virtual PBX services also offer faxing capabilities. Some of them even offer online conference calling capabilities – allowing you to hold conference calls with multiple people simultaneously without using up all of your phone lines. When a user dials an extension, the call can be transferred into a queue, forwarded to one or more lines such as a home, office or mobile phone, or even answered online using your computer.

Some of the companies we have worked with in the past include j2 Communications, eFax and RingCentral. J2 and eFax are normal online fax services, although j2 does offer an online conferencing service. RingCentral includes this as well as a virtual PBX service. All three companies offer custom plans depending on the capabilities that you’re looking for and the price you’re willing to pay. Etnacom is currently using RingCentral for various telephony services and has been using them since 2006. We’ve never had any problems with them.

Our next article will take telephony services a step further and show you how to stop paying for telephone lines altogether. We’ll explain how to use VoIP (voice-over-IP) services such as Skype and Virtual Assistant / Paging services to act as virtual receptionists.