With technology acing its way into the corporate sector, digital-only solutions have become inevitable. They not only help enterprises manage enormous amounts of data but also deliver a purposeful experience to customers. Traditional businesses are unable to survive the fierce market competition with old-school methods of onboarding customers. These manual methods for data entry take a toll on business efficiency as well as user satisfaction, ultimately resulting in lesser customer conversion. While delayed data acquisition is one hurdle in an effortless customer journey, data management is the flip side of the coin.
ICR – Intelligent Character Recognition – can extract accurate customer data, arrange it in a manageable form and store it on cloud storage for better data retrieval. The ICR technology is the advanced version of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which is used to read textual information from paper-based documents and convert it into digital form.
ICR – The Dos and Don’ts
ICR or intelligent OCR, as compared to traditional data extraction systems, can read a wide range of text including:
- Complex fonts that are not commonly used and understood by an OCR engine
- Handwritten text, notes, and signatures
- The text was written in different languages (depends on how well the ICR engine is trained)
Normally, the ICR technology is powered by artificial intelligence models that learn information over time and get better. The rate of learning usually depends on how many documents the ICR software utilizes and extracts information from. The fact that these models are constantly evolving is directly linked to the fact that these solutions can lack correctness.
For instance, if the ICR solution is presented such a document that it hasn’t worked with before, it will fail to recognize but will create a new template of the document format for future interpretation. More data means efficient learning ultimately resulting in a refined ICR technology. What Role Does IWR play in ICR Technology?
ICR uses a method called Intelligent Word Recognition (IWR) to perceive handwritten texts (words, sentences, signatures, etc.). With IWR, real-word documents, that are difficult for a normal Optical Character Recognition OCR to interpret and extract, could be extracted in seconds. The data fields not recognizable by the ICR are analyzed using IWR techniques to automate manual data entry tasks.
How Does ICR Technology Work?
Acquire Required Data
The end-user submits a document, certificate, or any piece of paper with printed or handwritten text to the verification system. The photo of the document is then sent to the ICR engine for further processing
Performing Data Extraction
Once the document is ready to be extracted, ICR technology uses pre-processing techniques to make the document ready for feature extraction. Then, data fields like first name, last name, and date of birth are extracted from the document. Handwritten text is extracted using a different set of methods based on IWR.
Data Representation and Storage
Once all the required data is extracted from the document, it is converted into an electronic form (a digital PDF) and stored on an online database or cloud storage where it could be retrieved with a single search operation.
ICR Technology and Data Management
ICR technology is not only limited to extracting the required data and creating digital PDFs out of it. Today ICR is used by real-world businesses to address customer onboarding concerns and manage the sheer amount of data. The best thing about ICR technology is that working with unstructured documents is not an uphill task now. Enterprises are utilizing intelligent solutions based on ICR technology for automated form filling to provide customers with a seamless experience.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is one modern technique that corporate entities are moving towards to make their business operations effective. Using models based on machine learning and ICR technology, RPA allows enterprises to cut on manual labor-intensive tasks and automating tedious procedures. This way, manual data entry is moving towards automation at an industrial level.
To wrap it up, Intelligent Character Recognition technology allows businesses to interpret, extract and manage a good deal of customer data, automate manual user onboarding procedures and achieve the all-important customer retention they need to survive the market competition.