Recently we met a real estate executive who had the preference of using a $2 business card scanner app to maintain contacts instead of organization's own business contact manager. It reminded us of another instance during our survey study when we came across a sales manager who used personal spreadsheets for documenting opportunities instead of using company's sophisticated CRM system​.

1. Five
Reasons Why Personal
OCR-based Business Apps do not
help Organizations
Recently we met a real estate executive who had the preference of
using a $2 business card scanner app to maintain contacts instead of
organization's own business contact manager. It reminded us of
another instance during our survey study when we came across a
sales manager who used personal spreadsheets for documenting
opportunities instead of using company's sophisticated CRM system​.
​Nothing is wrong with personal app or individual's spreadsheet. But
an organization's viewpoint is very different:
1. The ​business card reader app​ is usually for personal use. The data
stays in the user's phone, in the same way the spreadsheet might
stay in the user's own folder. The organization does not benefit from
it. Since it is a personal system and not used by entire organizations,
contacts do not get consolidated and relationship intelligence cannot
be derived from it. The CRM is unable to see this data or capture the

2. details of the handshake. The question of Who Knows Who? Cannot
be effectively answered.
​2. The OCR data in business card readers cannot be trusted - It will
be to be double-checked and edited manually for accuracy. The
business card is a work of art​ and in its scanning there is a big
probability of parsing error. The way the photo is taken also makes a
massive difference to the OCR parser's output. For full accuracy,
companies like us use human transcription. Our users just take a
photo of the card and confidently assume that accurate data will
arrive. The data can be trusted and can be acted upon with
confidence in enterprise-wide campaigns, marketing automation or
CRM. This is not possible with a personal OCR based app.
3. There are practical areas where OCR will just fail. We have seen
scribbled data coming from post-it notes, paper napkins and from
photos of contact information from the boards. Then there are
countless examples of numbers and email addresses manually
corrected on business cards. In addition, we have seen cases where
the photo of 'Bill To' field of purchase orders are taken instead of
business cards. Product warranty cards with handwritten data now
accounts for a large volume. These are very difficult cases for a
business card scanning app.
4. While the native integration with CRM and other systems as a
natural advantage for ​enterprise contact manager​, we also have to
consider the capability of the system to adapt to the customer's
environment. One of our user has added over 30 custom fields to the

3. contact record. Another one has over 200 tags and equal number of
reports for their users so that all get consistent viewpoint. And there
is another who is using us only because of its capabilities to capture
and share notes where the history of every interaction is captured
and instantaneously shared within the organization and sent to
CRM. These are difficult with OCR based business card scanning app
meant for personal use.
5. Lastly, as compared to a mobile OCR app, an enterprise contact
manager is generally an end to end platform. There is a feature-rich
back-end application and a highly flexible front-end which can be
used by everyone within the company, its contractors, temporary
staff and even by untrusted partners. There are multiple layers of
security and the data is viewed accordingly based on the perspective
of the user.
We are not against business card OCR based apps. But we argue that
the ​contact data​ is more valuable to the organization when it is
shared between its teams, is centrally captured and integrated with
CRM, instead of being held in a digital personal rolodex with
questionable accuracy.​
Thanks for Passing by, Best of Luck!

4. About Contactous
Contactous acquires contact data​ from business cards and physical
documents, manually enters it for accuracy, presents it through a
feature-rich enterprise contact manager for analysis and integrates it to
popular CRM systems like Salesforce and ​Zoho​.