Zoho Leads AppThe exchange of Business cards is an honored tradition for obtaining contact information from the person you just met. Yet re-typing the contents into your CRM can be tedious and error-prone.

Zoho can help you with that. They have an app for the phone that allow you to scan business card contents into your Zoho CRM database: Zoho Card Scan.

The app can quickly and accurately OCR/scan most business cards and convert the data into the appropriate fields. (The key to a good scan is to position the camera over the card, tap the center of the card on the screen to help the camera define the best focus and then take the photo.) After you have made any necessary changes and saved the record, you can take an associated photo of the person so you can remember what they look like when you meet them again.

The Zoho “Card Scan” app allows you to select between exporting the new record to the Contacts or Leads module.

  • You can assign the record to another user in the company.
  • You can add a Note about your conversation or a Task to remind you to follow up.
  • You can add the record to one or more CRM Campaigns.
  • One of my favorite features is that all Email templates created for Lead records in the CRM are synced to the app. This allows me to quickly follow up with my new Lead by simply clicking the person’s displayed email address in the app and then selecting one of the templates from the bottom of the screen. I have one template I use frequently that has a pdf file already attached.

It all works beautifully. And by the way, if you have any associated workflows they will still be triggered the same as if you were in the full CRM web-based product. It may not matter but the Leads app is written in more languages than the Card Scanner app.

This app can be downloaded and installed from the Android or Apple stores.