Tech tips: Digitize that stack of cards

– Organizing contacts

Some contact-management systems provide basic contact searching and labelling, but you may find yourself looking for more.

As you move into tracking specific leads, your contact- management system may morph into a client-relationship management system. Here are some features to consider:

Tagging. Even a rudimentary contact-management system should include some form of tagging, enabling you to put contacts into certain categories that make sense for your business. These may be as simple as “RRSP,” “RESP,” “existing client” or “prospect.” The ability to define your tags helps you to classify your contacts according to your way of working.

Mobile integration. Making your contact database as portable as your smartphone means you can access contact details on the road. Some of the better systems will enable you to make use of mobile features such as mapping, so you can plot your course to your contact’s address.

Social integration. The ability to work with social media accounts is an important but oft-overlooked feature, especially if your clients are active in these channels. If your system can connect to your contacts’ social media accounts, then it can help you to understand what they’re talking and thinking about.

Industry rules may preclude you offering advice via Twitter, but that doesn’t mean that (once you have cleared Canada’s anti-spam legislation and National Do Not Call List requirements) you can’t start your next email or phone call to a client or prospect with a friendly comment on something they mentioned in a LinkedIn post.

Email tracking. Being able to connect emails to contacts is a powerful feature in a contact-management system. Software such as Daylite (www.marketcircle.com/daylite/) for Mac and ACT! (www.act.com) for Windows offer these features. Certain versions of the latter integrate with Outlook in case you prefer to use a familiar email system. Both the Mac and Windows software systems also allow you to add attachments to your contact records.

You also can get financial add-ons for ACT! that are specifically designed for the financial advisory business. For example, Act4Advisors (www.act4advisors.com) offers extra capabilities, including a document-scanning feature that attaches images of documents directly to your contact records.

Backup and synchronization. Keep your contact data safe. Some contact-management systems store your contacts in the cloud; others store your data on your desktop. A few systems do both, synchronizing between the two modes of storage, which helps to keep your contacts safe should your local device crash. FullContact (www.fullcontact.com), for example, is a cloud-based online address book that syncs with all of your Mac, Android and iOS devices. However, be wary of storing sensitive information about contacts if you’re storing your data on someone else’s server – even if it claims to be encrypted.

– Collecting contact data

Once you’ve chosen a contact-management system that’s suitable for your business, you’ll need to get your existing and new contact information into it.

Many contact-management products now feature integration with each other, enabling you to press a button and have the services synchronize with each other easily. Other systems may require an intermediate step, such as exporting to a common file format, such as CSV, before importing your data into the new system.

Most advisors also collect a lot of business cards. You have two options when dealing with these: buying a dedicated hardware scanner or using an app on your phone to read your cards.

Hardware scanners come in two flavours: general scanners that happen to do business cards; and dedicated hardware designed just for cards and perhaps the odd receipt.

Some scanners, such as the NeatDesk unit (www.neat.com), will scan up to 24 pages per minute, but also have a holder designed to take cards.

The benefit of these systems is that they serve multiple purposes and, in some cases, take multiple business cards in one go, meaning that you can attend an event and drop a whole stack into the scanner’s hopper.

If you would rather scan on the move, there are portable options. The wireless Fujitsu ScanSnap iX100 (www.fujitsu.com) is a long, stick-like device that lets you scan two business cards at a time to a tablet, laptop or phone. There are even smaller, USB-powered devices, such as the Xerox Card Scanner 200 (www.xeroxscanners.com) and the WorldCard Pro (www.penpowerinc.com), which are not much bigger than a business card and will scan cards into your Windows or Mac device.

The other option is simply to scan cards using your smartphone. Various apps exist that recognize the text on the cards that you photograph with your phone, then put them into a database.

The upside with smartphone-based scanners is simplicity and cost because you are already carrying your scanner with you. The downside is that holding the phone steady can be difficult and light conditions can be poor. The more blurry and dark the image, the less accurate the character recognition is likely to be.

Some apps compensate for these setbacks by bringing real people into the mix. FullContact, for example, includes a card reader app, available for both the iPhone and Android devices, that uses human operators to transcribe the details from scanned business cards into the correct fields. This process takes 20 minutes and reduces or eliminates the need to edit details after the scan – but it will cost you: after 10 initial scans, you pay US$10 for 50 cards and US$90 for 500. How happy you are having human beings reading your contacts’ business cards will depend on your appetite for risk.

Alternatives that rely purely on optical character recognition include Microsoft’s Office Lens (www.microsoft.com), which also scans regular documents and can be placed into business card mode, enabling the software to save contacts to your local device and to a cloud-based address book.

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