Blue Book Services
Chris Thoms, Systems Technologist for Blue Book Services, talks about their migration to cloud services and how Concord Fax works with Office 365. Additionally, he describes their process of integrating faxing with OCR software to improve workflow.
You can also read the transcript below.
Why did you choose Concord Fax?
We were looking to get away from on-premise technology, hardware, and the hassles of taking care of servers, maintaining service agreements, and dealing with complicated upgrades.
Why did you decide to move to cloud-based services?
We decided to move off of an on-premise exchange server with an Office 2003 environment to go into the cloud, letting Microsoft handle all of our needs through the Office 365 environment and that has been fantastic for us.
Can you describe the integration process?
The integration of Office 365 and Concord Fax was almost simultaneous. We started the investigation of both services approximately a year ago. They have been on our radar and this year was the year to put both of these services into place.
Can you describe your OCR processing of faxes?
One of the major tools we use to gather data for our service, and provide credit information to customers, is through Teleform. We use a form based solution through Teleform where we fax out forms that have specific information that we are looking for through surveys. That information is then faxed back to us through Concord Fax and integrated directly into our CRM system. It has been a flawless connection with Teleform, Concord Fax, and also Office 365. The quality of the data and the amount of verifications that we have to do has been reduced due to the quality of the faxes. The quality of the faxes that we have coming back in a TIFF format has been outstanding and that has reduced a lot of manual processing we have had to do in the past to verify our forms.
How are you currently using the Concord Fax API’s?
The API tools that are provided by Concord Fax were introduced to us by their Premium Support team, in particularly by Jason. He got us into the Developers Portal and gave us the background that we needed to investigate the use of the APIs. One of the APIs that we use is the ability to fax documents through our CRM system, whether it is surveys, correspondence, contracts, or other faxes. We use the API to directly hook into Concord Fax through our Sage CRM System. On the inbound side we are using an API to come up with data in regards to the success and failures of our faxes. We have a lot of fax numbers in our CRM software and the manual process of verification did not work for us, so we’re relying more and more on the API to get failure notices and create reports to pass off and cleanse our data.
Have you been happy with the service uptime and availability?
Overall we have been very pleased with the availability of Concord Fax for outbound and inbound. One example would be when we were down while transitioning to Office 365 for a couple hours. The faxes that were scheduled to be delivered to particular email addresses were held by Concord Fox, allowing me to go back into the Portal and release the faxes to come back down to us.
Has Concord Fax been easy to work with?
Overall Concord has been fantastic from the sales and discovery part of this project all the way to the support we are receiving. Their support is fantastic, I usually get a response within minutes or hours. Jason in the Premium Support team has been fantastic and has helped me get cover sheets ready, work with API’s, and get the information that I need.