OCR

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a technology that converts images of text — such as scanned contracts, business card photos, fax documents, or handwritten notes — into machine-readable, searchable digital text that can be processed, stored, and analyzed by software systems. In CRM, OCR is used to automate data entry from physical documents: business cards scanned in the field automatically populate contact records; scanned service agreements flow into contract management workflows; paper-based order forms are converted to structured CRM data without manual re-keying. As AI is applied to OCR, the technology now handles not just character recognition but intelligent document classification, field extraction, and validation — significantly reducing the manual work of document-driven CRM data entry.