Small Business Solutions
Takeaways from Biscom’s webinar with customer, Jared Vishney, CEO of Arctrieval
Ten years ago, entrepreneur, Jared Vishney set out to create a medical application to provide patients, healthcare providers, and hospital staff with an easy, secure, step-by-step process to request and release protected health information. Arctrieval used Biscom’s Cloud Fax solution to build a more efficient system for the healthcare and legal industry.
The following are key points from a webinar discussion with Bill Ho, Biscom CEO describing the process Jared used to select a cloud fax solution. The lessons are valuable for both a small business or department within a larger enterprise who is looking for a more efficient and cost-effective migration from on-prem fax to cloud fax.
Lesson 1: Look for Deep Experience in Security and Knowledge of Your Industry
Healthcare and legal faxes need to be 100% secure from creation, storage, and transmission to another authorized third party., especially in healthcare with HIPAA, HITECH and now the Cures Act.
An information breach, whether willful or even accidental, can result in serious fines and penalties and significant work to respond and investigate a breach, not to mention fixing the problem.
Biscom has deep security experience when working with healthcare and legal organizations.
Lesson 2: Define the Functional Requirements and Business Model
The goal is to simplify the medical record request process, to save time and costs, and deliver the results as quickly as possible with the least amount of friction.
We needed a system to fit the technical capabilities, the business case, and work within our SaaS pricing model. First and foremost, we are a Microsoft technology partner using Windows Server, SQL Server, and .NET. And we had to have an API that would integrate with that stack.
The other things we started looking at was to migrate to the cloud, and very early on, we determined that we were going to deliver our own services through the cloud.
Lesson 3: Criteria for Selecting a Cloud Fax Vendor
We discovered not all vendors are created equal.
Some of the things I think anybody should look at is the sales team and pre-sales support. How responsive are they prior to the sale? And that’s an indication whether they are really excited about your business? If they’re not going to be attentive prior to the sale, whether it’s $1, or $1,000, or 10,000, what’s it going to be like after the sale?
The other thing was technical support. During the sales process how easy was it to get to technical support – not just the pre-sale support for configuration of a server. Are they really interested in your success? Will they log on to the server, do a remote desktop session to really dig in and will they stay past five o’clock?
Constantly probing and contacting technical support and the staff during the evaluation period, even sometimes with silly questions, just to see where you get and how fast the response would be. Even if it’s a silly question that they don’t consider important, sometimes the silly questions are important. So it goes back to the sales team, and part of it is in the technical folks providing information, arranging the technical meetings if needed, working towards a solution together.
We looked at some notable SaaS vendors and they just didn’t have the technical support people to answer questions. If you want to sign up for SaaS-based online, e-fax type of service, there might be some good ones out there, but they just didn’t have the people to answer the questions. So that was a non-starter for us.
For us, we didn’t take it seriously if the salesperson said everything just worked because that’s not the reality of things. We gravitated to people that were honest with the limitations of their products, so we could adjust for it. We don’t expect everything to be perfect.
We selected Biscom because it ticked the most boxes. It was a hybrid solution, which was nice. They had a well-documented API, and a trial version, which was great. The biggest thing for us though was it required no investment in any server hardware – just pay as you go.
The Value of a Good Cloud Fax Partner
The biggest thing that we found out is everything that was represented to us in the sales process and pre-sales support carried through long after the sale. I can call up today and say, hey, we’ve got a problem moving one of our fax queues, we’re spinning up a new server. And each time we migrated, it was always a physical machine to a physical machine. It was painful. And each time we went through that process, we could always count on getting somebody from Biscom technical support to help because we’re not fax experts.
Value is a combination, the relationship, what’s that worth? The quality of service, not just from the vendor to the partner or between partners, but also the quality of service that ultimately gets delivered to the end client.
In the end you’re bringing a joint solution to the market – you have somebody that’s an integral part of your solution, and with Biscom, you have the right technology, support and confidence they will be there for you – always.
For a recording of the full webinar, click here.