Zoho has a new Card Scanner app for iOS for its SaaS platform that allows a customer to take a photo of a business card and have that data stored in the Zoho CRM or as a new contact. The app scans business cards in English, French, German and Spanish. An Android app is coming soon.

Zoho developed the app to help sales people save time on manual data entry. Cards get left on a desk, never to be looked at again. Automating the process gives the customer a simple way to add to a contact or lead list.

Zoho Evangelist Raju Vegesna said in an email interview that the data is synced to the CRM back end. If a business card contains a Twitter handle, Zoho pulls the photo from the user’s Twitter account and syncs it with the CRM system.

The data can not be exported from Card Scanner but it can be exported in different ways after getting added to the CRM database. Vegesna said they plan to eventually offer exporting directly from Card Scanner.

Tight integration with the Zoho CRM system is what is unique about this app, said Vegesna. He said it’s true there are plenty of apps out there that do card scanning. But it’s not something that gets integrated into CRM platforms, such as Salesforce.com or Sugar CRM.

There are plenty of mobile apps for card scanning. Evernote Hello offers card scanning and tightly integrates it with LinkedIn and the relevant associated services people use every day, including their email and calendar. CamCard is known for its ability to process lots of cards and export to Excel.

It’s true that CRM vendors do not have card scanning integrations and so Zoho’s in-line capability to scan and store data is useful. But existing apps in the market like Evernote provide depth that Zoho will find hard to match.

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