Neat Tool to Eliminate Business Card Entry

If you are big into networking with your peers or attend multiple business events, you've probably got a stack of business cards sitting on your desk waiting to be entered into a CRM system. You'd love to have them available electronically for easy search and sortability, not to mention a clean desk, but you have other, more pressing issues.

This is where CardScan comes in. CardScan is a small electronic device that takes all your business cards, scans them, and then enters the data into your CRM system. It's not a mindblowing concept and it won't revolutionize your business, but it's a neat tool that's received really positive feedback from some of our customers.

CardScan has integration with three CRM systems, Microsoft CRM, Sage CRM SalesLogix, and Salesforce, as well as two contact management systems, ACT! Premium and Goldmine Corporate.

From what I have seen the application is really sharp. You take your stack of business cards and feed them through the little machine. Up on your computer screen a window pops up with all the information from the business card populated in a form. Company name, contact name, email, phone, etc...

Then you have the chance to edit the content. I'm guessing, but I'd say that 95% of the time, the text from the business card is correctly spelled and identified as the proper item. You do run into problems when business card standards are broken. If you have a company that makes it's email address larger than everything else, it may be identified as the company or the contact instead of email. You may also have trouble when a company uses an odd font. We saw one company that subtituted "S" for an image of a snake and CardScan couldn't properly identify the character. Fortunately this is the exception to the rule, and edits are easily made.

Finally you push a button and all the information is imported into your CRM system. Pretty easy.

So if you are facing a stack of unentered business cards, you may want to look into CardScan. Again, this isn't mind blowing technology, but any tech product that can easily make life better is a winner in my book.