Have you ever calculated how much time your employees spend searching for data and recreating files they need to complete their work tasks? If your organizational processes still rely on manual data entry and data retrieval, then you can be assured of storage issues, low productivity, inefficiencies, human errors, and resource-related costs. In the age of big data, expect the costs and complexity of manual data processing to skyrocket exponentially.
However, what if there was a more intelligent form of data capture to process and manage all incoming information regardless of the channel or file type? What if it incorporated artificial intelligence so that your business can gain deeper insights of the data you’re processing?
Invariably, capturing and extracting data from incoming files is a critical first step for many business processes, including those that are customer-facing. However, many companies still rely on outdated manual data processing. The resulting effects include bottlenecks, lost productivity, and increased turnaround times which also affects the customer experience and the bottom line.
In addition, as the pandemic has forced many organizations to operate remotely, the main competitive growth advantage lies with companies who have dramatically improved their customer experience. How much you can enhance customer engagement depends on whether you are ready to do away with legacy systems, manual-based data capture processes, and unintelligible data sets. The question is this: How do you reconfigure your processes to meet consumer demands for automation, self-service, personalized offerings, and a secure mobile-ready experience?
With intelligent data capture, you can enable real value across your customer channels while also empowering employee productivity and engagement. When you automate the data capture process, your team gets the information they need as quickly as possible. Moreover, through AI, the processed information is transformed into actionable data. So then, not only can you capture data, but you can also recognize, categorize, and collate data in real-time. In fact, according to Juniper Research, businesses can save over $8 billion by 2022 if they automate rules-based, time-consuming, and repetitive tasks.
This is where advanced capture technology can unleash so much value across the customer experience — even more than people (or organizations) realize. By automating the process of capturing data, your organization gets information into the hands of those who need it as quickly as possible. You turn information into actionable data.
What is intelligent data capture?
Intelligent data capture is a tool designed to both identify and extract critical information from incoming paper and electronic files using optical character recognition (OCR), intelligent character recognition (ICR), and optical mark recognition (OMR), without the need for comprehensive human guidance. Once the data is captured, it is validated before sharing with various systems. It frees up human resources once employed in manual data input and processing so they can engage in critical business tasks. It also reduces the reliance on shared workspaces since remote employees can access data from any location securely connected to the company’s network.
Intelligent data capture can be tailored to meet your business needs by adding customized roles, rules, and actions pertaining to data. You achieve complete control over where data is found, what is extracted, and how each piece of data is processed. Intelligent data capture uncovers intelligence lost inside unmanaged and unstructured documents.
Here are a few of the ways intelligent data capture can be used:
- Reconciling remittances for accounts receivable
- Automated data extraction from paper checks
- Simplification and classification of medical records
- Processing higher education transcripts
- Improving the speed of invoice processing
- Eliminating the burden of manual data entry and validation across all departments and industries
- Enhance data accuracy
- Extract as much data so you need
- Drastically reduce human error
- Achieve real-time analysis and insight of captured data with AI
Use the right tool for augmenting the customer experience
Intelligent data capture is designed to eliminate the pain points of manual processing that cause bottlenecks and frustrate already-impatient customers. Deploying intelligent data capture offers more than a check off your digital transformation list. Here are three vital reasons why intelligent data capture is the right tool to use, right now:
Raise productivity and efficiency with faster, seamless processes.
Contemporary businesses are deluged with data on a daily basis. There aren’t enough employees, or hours in the day, to manually read through the massive chunks of data and enter all the information accurately into company systems. Instead of your staff focusing on value-add, strategic tasks, they get caught up performing menial, redundant, error-prone, and time-consuming tasks.
Eliminate those issues with intelligent data capture that can read both printed and handwritten files, retrieve the right data, and sync the information with your existing workflows. As a result, your employees can focus on your company’s first priority: Your customers.
Make data-driven decisions using actionable insights.
It wouldn’t make sense to expect your employees to make insightful guesses about consumers or to completely comprehend a specific client’s entire history in real-time. But, we live in the instant gratification age, and customers don’t want to wait. They’re used to commanding various technologies to get what they want immediately.
The more rapidly you can serve your customers, and with accurate data, serves to improve the quality of the customer experience and the overall relationship. Intelligent data capture can extract, validate, and classify critical information in real-time while ensuring customer data is accurate. So then, employees and executives can make data-driven decisions at the right time.
Maintain security and confidentiality around sensitive customer files.
Cyber security is a common customer concern, especially when it involves sharing personal or sensitive information during transactions. Naturally, piles of paper and people handling them presents the risk of releasing confidential information.
Data breaches happen hourly. Customers are concerned about cyber security when it involves sharing sensitive information. Unquestionably, humans handling mounds of paper-based confidential data is quite risky.
Without the power of intelligent data capture on your side, it would be much more difficult to create an audit trail for manual paper processing activities. In contrast, intelligent data capture automatically creates a data trail via encrypted keywords and automated logging of end user activity. And, with an audit trail, you can improve the trust your customers have in your data management processes.
Never miss an audit trail for compliance
It goes without saying that most industries fall under regulatory statutes such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), the Health Insurance Portability Act (HIPAA), the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), and others especially organizations that keep electronic records. As a result, it is vital to maintain precise and auditable data with the proper mechanisms in place.
When automated, audit trails become more effective. Further, intelligent data capture can help to retain real-time audit trail reports and send alerts of suspicious activity. Included is specific information on which users are involved, when, and what types of activities have occurred or how the data was used and where it was sent. The good news is intelligent data capture doesn’t require additional manual labor to create and maintain auditable files.
Isn’t it time to augment your customer experience?
Consumers drive the marketplace. When they have their choice of brands at their fingertips, the main differentiators are agility and the customer experience. There isn’t any question that consumers will patronize a brand that offers engaging, seamless experiences while accurately anticipating needs and rapidly resolving issues.
The only way to gain this competitive advantage is to use the power of intelligent data capture, that combines optical character recognition (OCR) with AI to convert any text content into digital form. In addition, it can extract and organize data to extract actionable insights that facilitates your company’s ability to deliver augmented customer experiences at every touchpoint.
If you’re ready to discover how intelligent data capture can dramatically augment your customer experience, feel free to contact Processmaker today.
