How Data Capturing Services Can Benefit Your Company
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The Importance of Data Capturing Services

St. Louis, MO Company Servicing Companies Across the USA

Posted:
June 20, 2019
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Data Capturing Services Have Big Benefits

Data capturing describes the process of collecting, formatting, arranging, and storing data electronically in ways that make it easy to search for information and retrieve the data as needed. Most of the time, the data captured is stored in an online database that takes up way less storage space than traditional hardcopy files. Companies can certainly capture their own data using various tools, but the process has become so important that many companies choose turnkey data capturing services at companies like Datadash.com to manage data capturing services across multiple channels, offices, and systems.

Data capturing has become an essential business process that no company can survive without in today’s digital marketing culture. There are many ways that companies capture data – data entry, optical character recognition and electronic identification and classification of documents. Analyzing onsite and offsite customer behavior can also generate many marketing insights.

There are important processes that are associated with data capture. These include classifying data so that unauthorized people can’t see certain confidential information and indexing data to make them easy to retrieve. Indexing also facilitates regular and custom searches. One of the key processes of capturing data is verifying its accuracy and validating its relationship to other data in the database.

No matter what kind of business you’re running, data are the main standard by which you achieve success or struggle to stay in business. Data capturing services are essential to the process of using data strategically – whether the capture is done in-house or outsourced. You should follow these best practices for collecting data:

  • Collect data from existing customers, and look for ways to confirm the information throughout the year.
  • Get data from website analytics, telephone calls, Live Chat, customer service email campaigns, and other communication options.
  • Make sure that your sales staff enters the necessary information for qualifying sales leads.
  • Integrate all your existing data sources into your database including business intelligence, old hard-copy records, and internal and external data sources.

The Benefits of Outsourcing Data Capturing Services

Operational efficiency is the goal of most agile business processes in today’s marketplace. Expert data capture companies have the necessary technology and equipment to process a vast amount of data in a short time. The benefits of outsourcing data capture services to a service partner include:

Cost and Time Savings

Labor ranks as one of your top expenses, and it doesn’t make sense to use highly qualified staff for repetitive manual work. Data capture usually requires a large workforce to be effective. Trying to do everything in-house can be expensive, time-consuming, and less effective than outsourcing the work to qualified experts. The savings extend to labor costs,capital technology investments, and upgrade costs. There is no need to make changes in infrastructure or adopt new technology in ever-shortening cycles.

Greater Productivity

When you outsource your data capture services, you free your own people and technical resources to work on other objectives. Many of these data services work 24/7 to capture and integrate data.

Getting the Latest Technology

It’s almost impossible to keep up with all the demands for specialized equipment and technology. Outsourcing your data capture services lets you choose the most reliable companies with the latest technologies. You get great service from skilled teams with the technology needed for fast, accurate, and inexpensive data capture.

Smarter Choices

Outsourcing work to external companies brings the benefits of scaling their services based on your needs. You can contract for just those services that you currently need and pay as you go. As your needs change, you can work in partnership with your data capture company to scale your business up or down based on various benchmarks.

Mitigating Risks

One of the most important benefits of outsourcing is that you mitigate your risk of investing in technology and resources that become obsolete. Digital tech evolves at exponential speed, and there’s no guarantee that today’s cutting-edge data capture technology will still be the best option in a year or two. There is less danger of getting stuck with an obsolete capital-intensive system when you hire outside talent to do the heavy lifting for your business.

Gaining a Competitive Advantage

Your competitors are always looking for an advantage, and you should do the same – especially when it comes to capturing critical data that are used to make strategic decisions.

More Time to Focus on Core Competencies

Every business has a mix of core and standard business processes. The standard business processes – like data capture – can and should be outsourced if they cut into your core income-generating processes.

Having a One-stop Solution for Data Capture Services

Having a one-stop solution for scanning, indexing, formatting, scanning, and manually entering information is the ideal solution for automated data capture and integrating your existing information in digital and hard-copy files.

Details About Data Capturing Services

What are the processes used to capture data? Computer and software technologies can automate data capture from customer behavior on your website, customer use of self-service features and customer service interactions. Your software can also integrate data from various processes using OCR, ICR, OMR and other technologies. Conversely, you can outsource your data capture services to companies that already have the infrastructure to use these technologies effectively to build your database. The most common data capture processes include:

Data Entry

Most companies have an enormous amount of information that hasn’t been integrated into their operating systems. Old files can be an invaluable resource for profiling customer behavior and analyzing old contracts to generate business insights. When all your old records are in the system, you can research any issue electronically and never worry about multiple entries, errors of omission, and incomplete records that don’t record key information.

Managers, customers, salespeople, and other staff need digital access to the information in hardcopy files, but the process of manually entering information into the system is labor intensive and often a waste of your top talent. That’s why choosing a specialized data capture services vendor is the best strategy for digitizing all your hardcopy records. Professionals use the latest technology to enter, verify, and classify data.

Working with a single full-service data capture company like Data Dash, you can better maintain an accurate database and highly organized system. The right vendor has the tools to capture data from documents, identify, and classify the information, validate and verify the data – especially old information from company records – and index the data for keyword searches and searches using other criteria.

Data Validation and Verification

Some companies value the accuracy of their data too highly to rely solely on a single person entering critical data. Double-blind data entry is a data verification process that uses two operators to enter identical sets of data. The software can flag any discrepancies, and both sets of data will need reconciling before the data are accepted into the system. The other common method of verification is proofreading.

Data validation is another issue entirely. Verification ensures that the data has been entered correctly but does nothing to confirm the information. Validation refers to formatting and other issues so that the data match a specified range in the applicable dataset.

ICR, OMR, and OCR Recognition

OCR is an older technology that many people recognize from the days before personal computers became common. OCR, which stands for optical character recognition, is a technology that can “read” print and understand it for classification purposes. Originally, there was a special OCR font, but the technology can now read any standard font.

ICR, which stands for intelligent character recognition, is an adaptation of OCR. ICR is mostly used for unstructured documents such as handwritten letters. OCR is used for structured and semi-structured documents. OMR stands for optical mark recognition and refers to handwritten marks on printed forms such as correcting the answers on a test or ranking a survey’s answers based their quality as potential sales leads.

Barcode Scanning

Barcode scanning is a turnkey solution for many businesses that want to manage their products more efficiently. Barcode data provides detailed information about products, supplies, inventory, expiration dates, warehouse locations, and other product-related information. However, any marketing or manufacturing business will also need data from other sources to stay competitive. Smaller companies might not have the tools for barcode scanning and tracking of inventory management, products, and business assets.

Intelligent Document Recognition

Intelligent document recognition, or IDR, can capture information from electronic and paper forms. Templates can distinguish between handwriting and printing and different types of forms for high-speed classification and indexing of mail applications, invoices, and other semi-structured documents. The information that can be captured includes names, addresses, tax registration numbers, keywords, logos, ZIP codes, etc.

Voice Capture

Voice capture is an important capability for all kinds of businesses that use multiple communication venues such as emails, voicemail, chat services, customer service, etc. Voice capture software can record and play voices and capture the emotional nuances of voice communication. There are also applications that capture voice commands to start business processes, store vocal records, and convert speech to text.

Scanning Services

You probably already have scanning software, but have you considered how much time you’d need to fulfill your wish list for integrating every bit of critical data into your system? Professional scanning services are ideal choices for businesses that want to get the maximum value out of hardcopy data and store the information quickly in searchable electronic files. Many companies send their incoming documents directly to a data capture services company to stay on top of the vast amount of new data coming in each day and to keep current with industry trends. Employees can waste many labor hours looking for paper files among hundreds, if not thousands, or trying to scan or enter the information imperfectly. And files that go missing completely end up costing companies more time and money.

Scanning is an excellent way to get caught up if you have old files that haven’t been entered into your system. The benefits of engaging external scanning services include:

  • Capture miscellaneous sources of information such as receipts, bills of lading, manifests.
  • Use phones as scanners to capture information for integrated software applications.
  • Send all documents to a company that can handle all your data capture services and acts as a central clearing house.
  • Use ICR or manual keying to enter data from unstructured documents.
  • Use OCR technology to turn printed materials into usable electronic data.
  • Integrate with your barcode scanners and product barcodes to deliver real-time information.
  • The right data capture services vendor can handle all your needs to capture data from mailing lists, HR documents, past invoices, customer service transactions, market research surveys, and more.

Content Management Software Integrates Your Data in Usable Form

Content management software, CMS, is ideal for using your data effectively in your marketing and sales processes.
Laserfiche® Enterprise Content Management software matches Windows guidelines and integrates seamlessly with multiple data capture methods. Using the software, you can start your own imaging station and scale your operation to include hundreds of stations when needed. Data Dash also provides a full suite of on-demand data capture services as you need them.

Collecting the Right Data in a Timely Way With Data Capturing Services

It’s crucial to collect data in a timely fashion, and you should use all your data sources including documents, invoices, BI information, and information on hardcopy and online forms. The world runs on data, and timely information can help you improve marketing efficiency, increase sales and generate HR efficiencies. However, managing data capture services is a highly specialized, repetitive and labor-intensive field. That’s why you should consider outsourcing your data capturing services to qualified experts.

Your operational efficiency is always on the line. Improving sales and efficiency is the nature of the business, and capturing all possible information from your documents gives you an incredible edge over your competitors. Finding a worldwide partner that can handle all of your needs is an important task that’s worth some extra effort.