We take the security and privacy of data very seriously. First, the environment created for every organization is independent of others. The database, settings and even the execution code of the application is kept separately for every organization. This provides a high level of data security. Second, we deploy industry standard SSL communication to communicate between application and server. This is in addition to the database encryption that has been deployed on the database. Lastly, all operators in Contactous have formal NDA about the data they transcribe and there is a commitment by Contactous to uphold the privacy of data, as mentioned in our Privacy Policy.

Your data belongs to you. We do not take ownership of any of your or your company’s data. The Administrator from your organization can export and remove your data from our servers at any time.

​No, Contactous is not a CRM. It is a feature-rich business contact manager that focusses on the most important component of CRM - Contact Data. Contactous is complimentary to CRM. It has application to acquire contact data from physical documents, ensures that the data is accurate through manual transcription, consolidates contact records from multiple sources and integrates them to popular CRMs like Salesforce and Zoho.

​By creating an account for them within your system. Once done, they can login to through mobile app to take photo of business cards and send it to your Contactous environment.

Contactous' plan is billed annually. We create a separate environment for your company which can be customized to your business requirements. The plan is dependent on the number of cards transcribed and managed for one year.

Yes, you can certainly cancel the annual plan at any time. The refund amount is based on the number of cards maintained by the system. Since a base package is of 5,000 cards, the refund amount is calculated as (5000 - Number of cards used) * Price of Package / 5000.  For example, a 5,000 card package has been purchased for $900 / year. After few months into the year when the number of cards used were 2,000, the plan is canceled. The refund amount will be (5000 - 2000) * $900 / 5000 = $540.

​If the data from your card reader is accurate, then you can export from OCR reader into a CSV file and import into Contactous. Alternatively, just export the business card images and import them into Contactous, where they will be transcribed manually by us.

Majority of customers use Contactous to get accurate data from business cards and integrate it to CRM and other applications. For this, the implementation primarily involves creation of users in the system and informing them about it. We do provide a quick implementation guide for our customers to help them get started. 

However, there are customers who use Contactous for building relationship links between contact records, maintain separate records for organizations and its employees, add more information to every contact in custom fields, etc. In these cases, the implementation could take longer as data planning is required. 

​Yes. In Contactous, a contact can be a person or a company. A person could work for a company which may or may not be a separate contact record in the system. When a new record from a scanned business card is created, there is an option to create a company record from that individual's. Not only a new company is created, that individual gets automatically linked to the new company.

​You will need to enter the user as a contact record by selecting 'New Person' from 'Add' menu. Then go to the 'Access' tab of this contact, enable access and assign a login/password. A user will been created. The same login/password can then be used to access the web and mobile app.

There are either Administrators or Users. The users are of three types - 1) they can either edit/delete anyone's records; 2) those who can view all records but edit/delete only their records and 3) restricted users (explained in next question below). Users can be categorized into groups like departments (eg, Marketing, Sales, Manufacturing), regions (eg, Asia, Europe, Africa), etc. An administrator can create the user groups from Admin panel.

A restricted user has limited view of the data. This type of user can access the system only through mobile app and not the web-based interface. The restricted user has visibility only to the contacts and cards entered by that user's accounts. This account is commonly used for contractors, temporary staff, resellers and channel partners.

​You should ask your organization's Contactous administrator to provide you the access. The best practice is for the administrator to create a group for all users who need this access and then assign individual users to it. 

​While Contactous has all the commonly used fields required for a contact record, the system allows you to create additional fields . The new fields can be applied to individual records (eg, employee ID, type of employee, relationship manager etc) or to an organization (eg, business registration number, CRM ID, Bank Account Number etc). You can also apply the same field to both individuals and companies. The fields could be single line or paragraph of text, a number or a drop-down list. The data in all new fields can be searched by 'Advance Search' function. You can add a field any time, but it would be best to plan them in early stages of implementation.

​The easiest way is to give your user access (login / password) to your assistant. The cards will get scanned in your name. After the scanning is complete, you can change the password, if required. Alternatively, the assistant can scan all the cards using the assigned account and then change the 'Contact Owner' of all the cards to you from the web-based application.

The app provides access to organization's contacts from user's mobile phone. A regular user can access entire organization's records while a restricted user can view and edit only those contacts belonging to that user's account. Both types of users can take a photo of the card and submit it for transcription. Here is a summary of app's features:

- Ability to search by name, company name or email address
- Quick access to user's own contacts, all contacts, names by tags and by alphabetical index
- Exporting of contacts to CRM as a lead (if CRM is configured)
- Display of full information of contact record
- Photo of business card and tags of the contact record
- View and Add notes for a contact
- Ability to save the contact details and card's photo to one's phone
- Function to send full contact information through email
- Take photos of cards easily with enhanced auto-focus 
- Upload existing business card photos from phone's memory
- Capture photos of single and double-sided business cards
- Add tags to the photos taken by the app
- View FAQs and communicate with Contactous' Support

​Contactous Mobile App uses the functionality of your smartphone's camera to capture the image of the business card. The following will ensure a good picture of business card in general, - not only by Contactous' Mobile App:
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- Make sure that there is good light on the business card while capturing the photo. Natural light is the best. 
- Avoid shadows on the business card.
- If the card is in a folder or album, it would be best to take it out.
- Place the card on a flat surface while taking the photo, instead of holding it in hand.
- Place the camera on top of the card and ensure the left and right sides of the card are completely within the grid.
- Use the grid to ensure that the camera is parallel to the card.
- Use a steady hand while taking the photo.

It would be best to keep the business card in front of you in portrait mode, while the smartphone is in landscape mode. Ensure that the top and bottom edges of the card are within the grid. For further clarity, see our blog entry on this topic. 

The functionality to upload existing photos from your camera is available in versions released after June 2016. In case you do not see this option, please update your mobile app.

Contactous' mobile application is available both for Android and iOS based smart phones.  ​

​OCR is often inaccurate, esp when it comes to business cards where there are no standards and designs vary. Then there are types of cards which OCR cannot read. Different formats and fonts on cards makes OCR all the more difficult. A small error in a contact name can be risky and a single wrong character in email address can result in an undelivered email. As accurate data is at the heart of Contactous, we manually input the 4 important fields of a business card. However, we do capture OCR output which is indexed and intelligently clustered by the system.

In our base package, we capture the following information from the business card (if it is available): 
Full Name, Company Name, Email and Mobile. If there are more than 1 email address or mobile numbers then the first one is captured. If a mobile number is not present, the landline number is captured. We do have an Add On service in which we capture full information on the card. For more details, please refer to our Pricing section.

It is done by Contactous' full time operators who are based in Philippines and India.

​Yes, but we can accept it after studying a sample of the file. We will take this task if the minimum number of records are 1000.

We will need to study some samples of this data if we can directly enter the data. Please send us a few samples. 

Currently we enter data in English. For traditional and simplified Chinese, we have partners who can assist in the data entry. Alternatively, you can enter it yourself as the fields in Contactous can accept data in any language. These fields can then be searched and reports can be created based on search criteria.

No, we treat it as a single record in the system. 

​We capture it, esp when it is a key information of business card. For example, if a mobile number on a card has been manually striked off and another number has been written on it, we will capture the handwritten number. In any case, the image of card is available in the system so that the information can be re-edited at any time.

​If our trained operators can decide on which part of name is first and last, they will input it accordingly. However, it is not always possible. When in doubt, the entire name on name card is entered in the first name. The system has a different field for full name which adds the first, middle and last names to give the name on the card.

Yes, this functionality is provided to the administrators of the system.  The contact data can be selected from any static list, query results or manually clustered records and then exported. You have the option of exporting all the fields or only specific fields with your preferred delimiter. The output is a CSV format which can be used with other applications.

The user need to have an account with the CRM. If we support that CRM, the user will have to login to the account through Contactous. Once successful, the user can select a contact record on the mobile device and push it as a lead into the CRM which will receive the details of the contact, the notes, tags and even the image of business card.

If you are a customer of Contactous, you can influence our roadmap and priorities. If your CRM is a popular one and is not supported by us, we will prioritise our development work to facilitate a direct connection to it.

There is a powerful import function built within Contactous' web application and is accessible to administrators. You can import the data from a CSV or text file. The system will analyse each column of data and intelligently attempt to assign it to the right field within the system. You can override this assignment and send the data to the fields of your choice. If you have customized your environment by adding more fields, they too will appear in the import field list. In case you only have a few records in your clipboard, you will be able to paste them in the text box and import them directly into the system.

Yes, we provide an API for direct integration with your account in Contactous. The authentication is based on OAuth 2.0 protocol. This opens up possibilities like creation of web forms or integration with mobile applications to connect with your contact management database in Contactous. Please contact us directly for more information.