February 21, 2022

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Intelligent data capture technology is a customer experience game-changer

When given a choice between brands, customers will choose the one that excels at resolving issues, anticipates needs and goes the extra mile.

Danielle Simer

Marketing portfolio manager

Document storage shelves stocked with binders and boxes.

Capturing and extracting data from incoming information is an essential step for intelligent automation success, especially for customer-facing processes.

Your customers want to hear from you fast and with the most up-to-date information. Yet many organizations still capture data on paper and outdated methods.

This often causes bottlenecks and delays in processing, classification and retrieval, not to mention higher costs and lost hours — which often impacts customer interactions and experiences, and ultimately, your bottom line.

As businesses continue to operate remotely, customer experience remains a major competitive driver of growth. One of the primary tools for customer experience enhancements is data insights.

The challenge, though, is often behind the scenes: A combination of legacy systems, messy datasets and manual paper-based processes that create a frustrating ordeal for customers.

How can you redesign your processes to meet customer expectations for an automated, self-service, personalized and secure experience?

This is where intelligent data capture technology can unleash so much value across the customer experience. By automating the process of capturing data, your organization gets information into the hands of those who need it, as quickly as possible.

Intelligent data capture allows you to turn information into actionable data.

An intelligent data capture solution can automatically recognize, categorize and collate customer data in real-time, making your interactions with them faster, smoother more accurate and more responsive.

76% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments. 66% of customers report having to repeat or re-explain information to different representatives. 

— Salesforce, Fourth Edition: State of the Connected Customer, 2020

Level-up the customer experience with intelligent data capture

Intelligent data capture technology is changing the way people experience various service touchpoints by eliminating pain points that often frustrate customers.

Applying intelligent capture to your processes is more than just a check on your business transformation and CX improvement list. There are many other advantages you gain.

Here are three key reasons why capture is the ultimate tool to augment the customer experience:

#1: Faster, smoother processes with increased productivity and efficiencies

With information entering the organization in a deluge, it can be chaotic reading large amounts of documents and manually entering all that data into the system. This slow, tedious and error-prone workflow results in process bottlenecks, rising costs and lost hours as your staff gets held up doing menial, low-value tasks.

Intelligent data capture technology eliminates those issues by automatically reading printed or handwritten documents, extracting required data and syncing with your existing workflows. This frees your staff to work on higher-value tasks and focus on what matters: your customers.

#2: Accurate data, speedier decision making and access to actionable insights

Employees in customer-facing roles cannot be expected to derive insights on their own or understand the customer’s entire history in real-time. At the same time, service-level expectations are increasing, because in an age of instant everything, customers do not like waiting.

The more quickly and accurately you acquire the data you need, the better your customer relationship and quality of interaction will be.

An intelligent capture platform helps by extracting critical information, validating and classifying it accordingly while ensuring all customer data is complete and correct. The right platform also provides real-time insights and analysis into the capture process that empowers decision-makers to make timely and decisive actions.

#3: Secure customer data and confidentiality

Cybersecurity 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.

With a powerful tool like intelligent capture, you track, report on and potentially defend your actions and activities. The right platform provides an audit trail using security controls like encrypted keywords and automated logging of user activity and approvals. By assuring customers of data security, it builds trust in your interactions and relationship.

Deliver an augmented customer experience with intelligent capture

In this new business climate, customer experience is the ultimate differentiator.

When given a choice between brands, customers will choose the one that excels at resolving issues, anticipates needs and goes the extra mile in delivering engaging and frictionless experience.

To do so, look for an intelligent capture platform that combines tools and technologies — like optical character recognition (OCR), machine learning and artificial intelligence — to convert any content from text, video or image into digital format.

> Learn more | What is Optical Character Recognition (OCR)?

More than that, it should also intelligently extract and organize data to derive actionable insights that empower your organization to deliver superior customer experiences across channels and touchpoints.