Introducing ICR in Zoho CRM: Transform your printed text into digital data

Introducing ICR in Zoho CRM: Transform your printed text into digital data

From writing on papyrus in the ancient times to creating a humble record in your CRM, the world may have evolved with how it used to record data, but data entry as such has not been simplified. It is still a repetitive and arduous chore on which businesses are spending a significant amount of time and resources.
 
But, in today's fast-growing world, spending time to manually feed data field-after-field drains out the productivity from your business. And, one of the intelligent ways to tackle this age-old problem? Using intelligence itself—Intelligent Character Recognition.

Idea
Intelligent Character Recognition is a cutting-edge technology that can recognize and capture characters in printed texts and transform them as digital data.  
Imagine the case of vendor management in an eCommerce business; your agents creates individual records for each vendor registration and verify their credentials to qualify their contract.
 
Up next, think of patient registration at hospitals; the patients have to fill out the registration forms manually, submit the Govt. issued health card, and the staff has to feed them into the system.
 
For one more, let's look at the warehouse management process. The stockists feed the newly launched product into the system one after the other with all the specifications.
 
Finally, the revered sales process. Records created via webforms will have minimal information about the prospects. To qualify, the reps reach out to the prospects and collect more prerequisite information.
 
All these examples involve multiple back and forth, a lot of visual toggling between the physical asset and the system—the fatigue is real, and employing ICR for these data entry chores helps businesses to focus on your business processes efficiently.
 

ICR in Zoho CRM

Built as an ancillary to Zia Vision, ICR employs a few-step process to create new records and enrich existing records from images.
 
All you have to do is train Zia; the model will be ready to localize characters in your image. You can start to upload, verify, and save as a record.

Here's ICR at work!
 
Training Zia with sample images
​
Creating new records​
Enriching existing records from attached images​

There—that's all about ICR in Zoho CRM.
 
What you are seeing is our first cut. Down the road, we have plans to extract and enrich records and subforms using invoices, forms, bills, and handwritten texts. We are also working to optimize our model to extract without having to train Zia upfront. We shall soon meet with finer enhancements to ICR and till then—take care! 👋
 

Release plan: This is available for partners and customers in US DC.

Help document: Intelligent Character Recognition by Zia Vision

Thanks and have a good one! 

Kind regards,
Saranya Balasubramanian