After 9 years, I’m thinking about moving to a new house. I’m not looking forward to packing up and moving a decade’s worth of stuff, and I’m even less excited about all the Change of Address forms I’ll have to fill out to make sure my bills and mail follow me. Inevitably, they don’t all get entered properly and I’ll have to track each one to avoid late fees or worse, miss out on my favorite magazines. If only everyone used a reliable handprint capture solution to update my accounts without someone having to retype it, which is where all the trouble usually starts.
Being in the capture business, I know that such solutions exist, because we at Datacap offer one. Over the years, customers like TV Guide and the Baltimore Sun have used Datacap Taskmaster with Parascript’s handprint recognition engine to recognize Change of Address entries and other fields on subscription documents and pass that data to the mainframe with a minimum of human intervention.
Alas, organizations like the above are the exception and not the rule. The fashion these days is to send those forms overseas for hand keying, taking advantage of lower labor rates. There is a perception that handprint capture, or intelligent character recognition (ICR), is not as reliable, therefore, credit card companies, utilities and publishing companies go to the enormous task of outsourcing – with dubious results.
Yet, ICR has improved dramatically in the last ten years as vendors like Parascript have developed new algorithms for analyzing handprint and new techniques for using databases to support the recognition process. It is a demanding science, to be sure, but worth it if you’ve got several thousand Change of Address forms coming in every week from your customers. Indeed, the US Postal Service uses the Parascript engine in its own solution for processing handprint.
If you want to see the state of handprint capture today, sign up for a webinar on May 25 that Datacap is hosting, which features a Taskmaster-Parascript integration by Cutting Edge Solutions, one of Datacap’s leading integrators in Kansas City. The webinar will be lead by Cutting Edge Solution’s co founder Jack Roberts, who built the application. I’m looking forward to it myself, because when I don’t get next month’s issue of Mad Magazine, I want to be able to tell customer service how easy it will be to fix the problem.
