A little over a year ago, I wrote a paper on intelligent capture for digital transformation, sponsored by ABBYY, and gave a keynote at their conference on the same topic. The original English version is on their site here, and if you read German (or want to pass it along to German-speaking colleagues), you can find the German version here. As usual, this paper is not about ABBYY’s products, but about how intelligent capture is the on-ramp for any type of automated processes and hence required for digital transformation. From the abstract:
Data capture from paper or electronic documents is an essential step for most business processes, and often is the initiator for customer-facing business processes. Capture has traditionally required human effort – data entry workers transcribing information from paper documents, or copying and pasting text from electronic documents – to expose information for downstream processing. These manual capture methods are inefficient and error-prone, but more importantly, they hinder customer engagement and self-service by placing an unnecessary barrier between customers and the processes that serve them.
Intelligent capture – including recognition, document classification, data extraction and text analytics – replaces manual capture with fully-automated conversion of documents to business-ready data. This streamlines the essential link between customers and your business, enhancing the customer journey and enabling digital transformation of customer-facing processes.
Or, in German:
Die Erfassung von Daten aus papierbasierten oder elektronischen Dokumenten steht als
zentraler Schritt am Anfang zahlreicher kundenorientierter Geschäftsprozesse. Dies ist üblicherweise
mit großem manuellen Aufwand verbunden – Mitarbeiter übertragen und kopieren
per Hand Daten und Texte, um sie so nachgelagerten Systemen und Prozessen zur Verfügung
zu stellen. Diese manuelle Vorgehensweise ist jedoch nicht nur ineffizient und fehleranfällig,
sie bremst auch den Kundendialog aus und verhindert Self-Service-Szenarien durch unnötige
Barrieren zwischen Kunden und Dienstleistern. Intelligent-Capture-Lösungen – mit Texterkennung,
Dokumentenklassifizierung, Datenextraktion und Textanalyse – ersetzen die manuelle
Datenerfassung. Dokumente werden vollautomatisch in geschäftlich nutzbare Daten umgewandelt.
So können Unternehmen die Beziehung zu ihren Kunden stärken, das Benutzererlebnis
steigern und die digitale Transformation kundenorientierter Prozesse vorantreiben.
Recently, I was interviewed by KVD, a major European professional association for customer service professionals. Although most of their publication is in German, the interview was in English, and you can find it on their site here.