Service example
Sales Operations
Business Cards to CRM Records, Automatically
An OCR and enrichment pipeline that turns a photographed business card into an enriched, categorised CRM record with follow-up already scheduled.
These examples describe workflow and implementation experience. They do not imply independent product ownership or identify a client.
The challenge
Manual entry was the bottleneck, and it failed silently. Nobody could tell which cards had been entered and which were in a drawer, so the leads that were never entered were also never missed. The cost was invisible, which is why it persisted.
The approach
- 01
Made capture a photo, because anything that needs an app installed at a trade show stand does not get used.
- 02
Ran OCR over the image and extracted name, company, role, email, phone, and website into structured fields rather than one blob of text.
- 03
Enriched the contact against company data, so the record arrives with more than what fits on a card.
- 04
Created the CRM record, categorised it, notified the owner, and queued the first follow-up in the same run.
- 05
Routed anything with low extraction confidence to a human review queue instead of writing a half-read record into the CRM.
Architecture
Business Cards to CRM Records, Automatically architecture. Main flow: Card photo, then OCR extract, then Enrich, then CRM record, then Follow-up. Connected paths: Review queue as a conditional path from OCR extract; Enrichment APIs feeding Enrich.
What was hard
OCR confidence is not optional metadata. A card photographed at an angle in bad light produces a plausible-looking wrong email, and a wrong email in a CRM is invisible until a bounce three weeks later.
Cards are inconsistent by design. Two phone numbers, a QR code, a job title in a second language, and no clear company name is a normal card, not an edge case.
Enrichment has to fail softly. When the company lookup returns nothing, the record still has to be created, because a missing firmographic is not a reason to lose the contact.
Related
Curious how this was built?
The full experience and skill set behind it are on the resume.
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