Businesses can never grow in isolation. Meeting new people, particularly those who are directly connected with your workfield, serves out to be a great opportunity to expand your business.
Sharing contacts are easier these days. However, with differentiation in personal and professional life, working professionals tend to segregate their contact details accordingly. You can ask the Facebook ID of a friend, but the same would be awkward when asked from a marketer. This is why business cards still play a major role when it comes to exchanging contacts.
Having said that, it no more makes sense to collect business cards and pile them in the drawer. You have the option to save them digitally and that too in your smartphone. This leads us to evaluate the role that the business card scanner apps can play in daily life. And with science and technology taking giant strides of development with every moment, the business card scanner apps of 2020 have been evolved to more than being merely ‘useful’.
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Why do you need a business card scanner app?
The only thing that doesn’t change in this universe is the fact that everything changes. With changes in time, every activity continues to sprint with an ever-growing pace. Same is with your business. It needs to mould itself and survive to the demands of the market, in which, the unalienable thing is working with dire efficiency. And a significant contribution to this efficiency is done by business card scanners. Let us have a brief take on the importance of business card scanners.
- Digitalisation: A business card scanner app converts paper business cards into digital and readable files. This allows you to save them in your smartphone as image or pdf formats.
- Language support: Most of the business card scanner apps have built-in multi-language support that enables to scan and store information of contacts of different regions.
- OCR technology: With the help of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, business card scanner apps extracts the written text from the captured image and save the entire information digitally in a proper format. Moreover, it also detects the borders and separates the card from unwanted backgrounds.
- Time efficient: Saving contact details have never been so easy. Business card scanner apps scan cards swiftly and allow seamless usage. You can save multiple cards within no time.
- Unlimited storage: A digital business card takes less than an MB of space, this means that you can save an almost unlimited number of cards in your device. This obviously makes your drawer available to store other things.
- Easy share: The most important feature a business card scanner app offers in the option to share the cards across platforms and with relevant persons. Besides desktops and smartphones, some of the companies also offer apps for smartwatches.
- Contact integration: Not merely scanning and extracting information but a business card scanner app makes the contacts readymade to be directly exported to the phonebook contacts. Moreover, they allow you to use fields like contact number and email id right from the app itself.
Best Business card scanner apps
| Name | OCR technology | Multi-language support |
Price |
| ABBYY Business Card Reader | Yes | Yes | Free/Paid |
| Zoho Card Reader | Yes | Yes | Free |
| CamCard | Yes | No | Free/Paid |
| CardHQ | Yes | Yes | Free |
| Wantedly People | Yes | Yes | Free |
| ScanBiz Cards | Yes | No | Free |
| Sansan | Yes | No | Free |
| Microsoft Office Lens | Yes | Yes | Free |
| Haystack | Yes | No | Free/Paid |
| WorldCard Mobile | Yes | Yes | Free |
1. ABBYY Business Card Reader
ABBYY Business Card Reader is one of the most reliable tools of its kind. It lets you scan business cards in up to 25 languages. It is highly accurate and precisely recognises every important field such as name, address, phone number and email id.
2. Zoho Card Reader
Zoho Card Reader uses your smartphone’s camera and OCR technology to scan cards. It extracts all relevant information and saves it in a proper format with relevant fields. Zoho also has an integrated tool to eliminate/merge duplicate contacts for better database management.
3. CamCard
CamCard comes with a wide array of features and offers a very well designed UI. Besides the general functionality of scanning cards, it also allows to add notes and set reminders to the contacts. There is also a ‘Secretary Scan’ mode that lets the executives invite their personal assistance for saving contact on their behalf.
4. CardHQ
CardHQ is a free card scanning software that allows unlimited entry and offers built-in sharing functionality even on social media platforms. Although being a lightweight tool, CardHQ does not misses out any essential feature.
5. Wantedly People
Wantedly People is one of those rare card scanning apps that enable multiple scanning at a time. This saves a chunk of time and is perfectly suitable for one who deals with the bulk of contacts daily. You don’t even need to arrange the physical cards evenly, just scatter them on a flat surface and Wantedly will precisely detect borders and extracts all the information from them.
Conclusion
Growth of a business organisation largely depends on how it cope up with the changing times. There are a ton of stories of blooming companies that vanished just because they haven’t met the requirements of changing technology. In our case, it is about the way of keeping contacts with you. And no doubt, business card scanner apps are the undisputed king in this arena. Unlike the traditional method of paper card exchanges, the OCR equipped scanner tools bring a spectrum of features to keep and manage contacts with utmost efficiency.
