Thursday 24 May 2018

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  . .  . 

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