AI-Enhanced Content Capture

Chances are good that you’ve sent an email to a customer service department at one point or another. Perhaps your order was late, items were damaged in shipping, or you needed to know how to initiate the return process. You may have found that while some companies are prompt in sending a reply and resolving your issue, you may not hear back from others for days. Although the timeliness of their response may have something to do with the nature of your issue, it’s also likely to be influenced by whether the company is still using manual processes to sort through incoming emails.

Retailers that offer a prompt resolution are likely using AI-enhanced advanced capture technology. These solutions offer the ability to quickly process incoming data, but they don’t stop at email. Advanced capture technology can process handwritten notes, snail mail, and even social media.

Several technologies come together to make enhanced content capture possible.

Capture

The workhorse of the capture technology is, of course, its ability to capture data from any source, including handwritten forms, emails, PDF files, Word documents, and more. Advanced OCR technology recognizes both machine- and hand-printed characters in any major language. AI-enhanced capture can also recognize specific forms and can manage complex capture workflows across different departments quickly. Most systems also capture mobile information, such as forms submitted via smartphone.

Digitize where needed

Based on predetermined configurations, capture technology can convert the information it captures into editable text or a searchable PDF file, depending on your needs. For example, some paperwork-heavy industries, such as medical offices, have begun scanning documents primarily for archival purposes, while others are transforming their entire business processes to become digitized.

Process, classify, and extract

AI uses machine learning, including natural-language processing and sentiment analysis, to gain a contextual understanding of the data. After it reads and understands content, it applies advanced recognition and auto-classifies it based on these findings.

AI-enhanced capture uses two types of technology to drive speed and accuracy:

• Zonal extraction: This approach uses a template that identifies fields to capture and their locations. It’s most effective for recurring documents, such as claims forms or vendor invoices.
• Freeform extraction: Using keywords and text analysis, freeform extraction is a flexible solution for retrieving data from documents that come from different sources. For instance, vendors may send your company invoices in multiple formats. AI-enhanced capture uses this technology to apply freeform rules that enable the extraction of key data from the invoices.

Together, these technologies automate data extraction to save time and reduce the risk of human error.

AI delivers clear, actionable insights and even predictive analytics. It also prioritizes content based on any additional established or learned criteria to trigger a machine-initiated workflow. For example, in the contact form scenario mentioned above, AI can quickly determine whether emails from customers have a positive, neutral, or negative tone. This ability to read and analyze sentiment allows the system to prioritize appropriately, so customer support personnel can deliver answers in a timely manner to the customers who need them most. Similarly, it can detect important differences between internal documents. For example, it can appropriately process invoices sent to customers versus invoices received from vendors requiring payment.

Validate edge cases

Another standout quality of AI-enhanced capture is its ability to help humans focus on challenging tasks. Not only does it reduce the tedious processing of data without the need for manual intervention, but it also brings edge cases to the attention of the right person for validation.

For example, an admissions department at a community college may be able to process most transcripts rapidly using capture technology. They extract the information and send the files to the appropriate repository. Yet, in some cases, the system might flag missing information or errors that exceed value thresholds. In these scenarios, these specific transcripts can be brought to the attention of the appropriate admissions officers so they can follow up with students or take other actions as needed.

AI-enhanced content capture becomes more intelligent over time. It learns from historical data to determine which cases can be considered normal and which require human intervention. It can also make decisions based on pre-established thresholds to deliver value to your organization right away.

Manage

AI-enhanced content capture also simplifies document management. With its ability to read and make meaning of data, it routes and indexes information to the appropriate place within the content suite repository. Because it also can extract keywords, it makes your data and content easier to search.

You can use AI-enhanced capture to automatically assign metadata from keywords to each piece of content that enters the enterprise, effectively acting as comprehensive translators. Although functions like HR, finance, and sales all have their own unique document types and language, these systems are sufficiently intelligent to understand their specific nuances. They can therefore manage content across the entire organization and link various functions seamlessly through simplified sharing and connections to line-of-business applications.

Visualize

Finally, AI-enhanced capture offers key analytics via dashboards and reports. It can deliver key performance indicators to help you spot inefficiencies in your business processes.