Getting the best out of Trade Shows

A substantiate amount of marketing dollars are spent on trade fairs and it is imperative to make each trade fair count. Bric APP is used extensively in trade shows to get the best ROI from each event

Basic essentials of a trade fair

Branding :

Branding plays a very important role in attracting foot falls and top of mind recall. Ensure that you are equipped with all the marketing collaterals like kiosks, standees, pamphlets, etc

Attract, Engage & Connect :

Effective branding & scouts with pamphlets can attract foot falls to the kiosk and every one of them may be a potential customer. A crisp opening discussion, followed by an interest enquiry and lead capture of the prospect would be a good start.

Lead capture :

The popular and quickest way would be to collect business cards.Though there are lead capture forms and APPS to enter customer information manually, the visitors may not take time to fill all the details or provide the same for a manual capture.Hence, collecting business cards will be the quickest option.

Converting business card data :

Bric APP is an extremely useful tool to scan business cards to contacts. You can either use the mobile APP, to instantly capture cards that are collected or use the Bulk scan service if there are large volume of cards and scanning them one by one can be tedious task.

Follow up & communication :

Once the business cards are accurately converted, then a follow up email or a brochure would be the most appropriate thing to do.You can export the business cards to Outlook or as an Excel CSV from Bric  APP's web account and use the data points to send out the mailer.

All discussions, follow up points and other tags can also be captured against each card for future reference on the Bric APP account.

Happy Selling !

Mercedes Benz Endorses Bric APP

Just when we published a blog on how Mercedes Benz uses Bric APP to stream line their lead management, we are glad to share their newsletter for 2017 which features Bric APP.

Join Mercedes and 100s' other companies that use Bric APP  to scan business cards and manage them effectively.

Whether you are looking to export business cards to excel, scan business cards from an APP or a business card APP for teams, we have a solution for you. 

Check out our bulk scan services to easily convert 1000s' of business cards.

Case study 1 : How Mercedes Benz optimised lead management through Bric APP

Mercedes Benz had a typical problem, they had multiple branches with each branch operating as a sales & service hub but had in-consistent new car sales though the walk - in traffic indicated otherwise..

They realised that though a business card is collected from almost every walk-in customer, the data never reaches the head office for driving engagement through marketing activities or sales tracking as they did not have a practise of scanning business cards. The branches that had an one off business card scanner were never used owing to the hassle of scanning and editing cards.Hence the lost opportunity. 

The marketing team got in touch with Bric APP's sales team which immediately chalked out a plan.They scanned business cards into PDF sheets which were accumulated for a life time and collated branch wise. They then used Bric APP's bulkscan service to scan business cards from the PDF sheets into customer data which were accessible on Bric APP's web dashboard.These cards were then synced to salesforce within seconds from the Web dashboard.

Incrementally all the front desk & sales personnel were equipped with Bric enterprise APP and started scanning every business card from a walk-in customer or prospect which immediately gets tagged to the respective branches and the head office.Every day the head office personnel can get real time updates on no of walk-ins / business cards scanned and the notes captured on them. And this data flows into Salesforce as well..

The sales team were also able to export business cards to Outlook and organize business cards in a much more efficient manner.

Mercedes Benz were so satisfied with the solution that they featured BricAPP in their annual newsletter.

Bric APP is not just being used as a business card scanner but also as a comprehensive business card management solution.

Check out Bric APP for clearing your business card clutter !

Business card scanner machines - Do they really solve the problem ?

Scenario 1 : large organization with a distributed salesforce and heavy influx of business cards which are suppoused to get scanned weekly through the office card scanner, but the Math doesn't add up ..   WHY ?

Scenario 2 : The sales team has returned from a trade fair with a large stack of cards and a tearing hurry to email the clients, and a card scanner is purchased.What seemed like 500 cards seems to return just 500 cards . .WHY ?

Scenario 3 : Katie the temp manages the office card scanner and each person has to wait their turn and be nice to Katie till she scans the cards of Senior Mgt and then obliges . .  But the wait is indefinite . . WHY ?

So Why does a card scanner fail in each scenario ? Lets find out.

Accuracy : The card scanners use a technology called OCR and no matter how accurate or evolved the software can be, it can never read all the cards accurately. 

This is because the layout, style of font, back ground colour varies from business card to card and there is never a standard template.

Human intervention : Due to the reason above, every card needs to be reviewed before it is saved. An email ID or name that gets mis-spelled can become redundant data and so the reviewer ends up spending time on all the cards scanned.

Time : Despite all the ergonomics, the average engagement with a card takes about 2.20 minutes from inserting the card, conversion and the review.

To scan 100 cards, it takes about 3 man hours, something that makes the user lose interest quickly

Portability : Cards are received at events, trade fairs, meetings etc. In each instance the sales person has to wait till they come back to office to scan the cards. 

Most of the business card scanners need to be connected to a PC with a software installed for it to function optimally.This is another major setback for quickly converting cards to contacts.

Cloud back up & Integrations : While some of the card scanners do offer integrations off late, most of the card scanners predominantly focus on reading cards and converting it to an excel.

The user has to download CSV files from here and upload to to other CRM software or contact folders.

Wear & tear : Like any other machine, the card scanner is subject to wear and tear too, though this may not be a major deterrent from an overall perspective, it does have a shelf life that can't be fixed.

So if a business card scanner machine is not effective, what is the solution ?

Bric APP is an one stop solution to all of the above, whether you want to scan cards one by one or multiple cards together as bulk.

Bric APP uses human transcription to accurately convert the cards and minimises the need to review data and at the same time facilitates quick scanning of all the cards.

 The cards will get processed at our back end and get updated back to the mobile & web APP within a few minutes.

Bric APP exports data to Salesforce, MS Outlook, Zoho, Hubspot and Google contacts as well as an Excel CSV.

Bric APP's bulk scan service facilitates users to send multiple images of business cards grouped together as a JPG or PDF file and we will crop and process these images as single records.

The cards can be scanned from a flat bed scanner or from a mobile phone grouping multiple cards together.

This service is ideal if you have accumulated 100s' of cards over a period of time or from a trade fair and scanning them one by one on the mobile APP can be laborious.

Bric APP is available on Android & IOS with a personal version and an enterprise version available for sales teams to scan business cards into a master directory of the company. 

         Bric APP scanning is accurate, fast and great value for money  . .  . 

Bric APP for IOS - Releasing shortly

            The much-awaited business card scanner APP for 2018

   Bric business card scanner for IOS is finally completing closed beta testing and should be available on the APP store by mid-February. A big thanks to all our early subscribers and customers who paid in advance for the patience.

What to expect in the first version :

   The business card scanner will work slightly different from the Android version, we have done away with the OCR option as we found no value in that as all our active Android users use the transcription option. The card scanner will hence have a single camera interface to capture pictures.

   The business card organizer feature helps sort all the contacts according to name, company or recent scans and helps to sync data to the iPhone address book and Google contacts. Scanning business cards to Salesforce and Office 365 will be available in the next version.

  You can also export business cards as excel either from the mobile APP or the web dashboard as CSV or Xls files, this is an easy fix to upload cards to other CRM or contact folders.

  Users can use the notes option to capture important information about the cardholder and also use this as a tag to search contacts.

  The IOS APP is also backed with a web interface and the scanned business cards can be accessed from both the APP & the web interface.

  The other options like Call / SMS / Email from the APP, bulk export & sync options are all part of this release. The scanned business cards can be shared with colleagues & friends as URL / VCF files through SMS & Email.

Why Bric APP for IOS ?

   If you are looking for a business card scanner that has an accuracy of  ~ 99%, fast scanning and transcription charges as low as 7 ¢ per card, then look no further than Bric APP. All you need to do is scan business cards continuously till you exhaust your stack and forget about it. The scanned business cards will get accurately transcribed and updated back to the contact folders with a cloud back up.

                   Sign up to avail 100 cards of free transcription

All About Bric APP

Owing to numerous queries on what we do and how different are we from the rest of the Business card scanner APPS, Card readers etc, we are putting together everything in a blog 

Intro Video

Card scanning & Accuracy :

The most important aspect of a business card scanner is accuracy, which an OCR ( optical character recognition scanner ) can never be, which means each card has to be checked by the user & edited wherever required. Imagine a scenario where you return back from a trade fair with 250 cards... Nightmare? 

Bric APP uses a combination OCR, AI & human intervention to turn out 99% accuracy in data capture. Hence it makes the process faster than a pure play transcription service with the same accuracy.
The service is competitively priced at a price range of 8 ¢ to 12 ¢ per card depending on the subscription which is almost 1/3 rd the price of the Industry average. Some of the vintage players charge around 30 ¢ per card.

Another very interesting card scan service is the Bric bulkscan service. Read the blog to know how you can get 100's of cards converted in no time.

Data Export & Sync :
The next important use case for a business card scanner App is to get the scanned data onto other folders.

Bric APP syncs the data to Phone book, Google Contacts, MS Outlook,  Salesforce and soon into other CRM like Hubspot, Zoho, freshsales, Zapier and so on. The data can also be exported as a CSV or XLS file and updated to other software.

The Important differentiator here is, there is no cap on no of exports syncs per day/week etc like most Scanning APPS. It's unlimited and has a simple interface to select & push multiple cards to multiple folders.

Sharing Cards :
Saved cards can be easily shared with colleagues APP to APP, APP to Mobile or APP to Email. The sharing does not require the recipient to have the APP, it can just be shared as a URL / VCF file through SMS or email. The contacts can directly sync into their contact folder.

Web account :
Bric APP also has a web interface from where scanned cards can be viewed, downloaded as CSV / XLS files. The upcoming features are integrations to other CRM from the web, data edits and uploading image files for transcription. A web interface gives a larger screen interface to engage with the data.

Sharing Personal Cards :
While this is still not an evolved feature in Bric APP and there is a lot of work to go into this like creating a personal card etc, Bric APP still enables users to scan their cards and share it as a URL / VCF file, similar to how contacts can be shared. It updates everyone as and when the card is updated

Bric APP has three versions, a freemium, Pro & an enterprise version, whereby the first two are for individuals and the third is best suited for corporates.

Check out Bric API for developers to integrate card scanning for their software / CRM

Bric API - Business card scanner API

Pass card images and get accurate results in Json

Most CRM / ERP software requires inputting customer/vendor details into the software and a major source of this data are business cards. Anything that involves manual input is a pain and in turn, results in lesser data entering the system and potential opportunity losses on account of that.

The CRM software in turn services lesser data resulting in a possible revenue loss for the provider. The solution to this would be to provide a feature to scan business card data directly into the CRM or ERP software, however, the provider may not have the bandwidth or feasibility to build a card scanner just for this functionality and here is where Bric API helps

Bric API is a simple yet powerful card scanner API to pass images of business cards and receive accurately transcribed data in JSON format. Bric differs from other card scanner APIs' by using a combination of back-end OCR & human transcription to return accurate data at a reasonably fast turnaround time.As part of the service offering, Bric will not record or store any of the client data that is transcribed on its server and data is erased once it is returned back.

Bric API is ideal for CRM / ERP / in-house customised CRM that has a need to extract business card data onto its system. The client has to ensure there is an interface either to capture images from the device camera or pass scanned images from any other source and Bric will do the rest.

If you are looking for a card scanner API that is accurate, fast, Secure & at the most competitive rates in the market, Do check out Bric API and sign up for a free trial!

Check out the Bric APP for teams and professionals . . .