About OCR Technology

When a customer/patient faxes us a completed form, we want the data within the received fax to be automatically entered into Salesforce rather than a staff member entering that data manually into Salesforce. What are our options to set this up?

Solution: You can configure what is called OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to read PDFs received from faxes. Opero Fax will get the PDF into SF. You would need to use another application or software or custom code to process that PDF with OCR technology to read the values on the PDF. Depending on your form and what you are reading, you can get better results and there are a few options around this. There is some dev effort to build this and you can certainly get great efficiencies when you have a high quantity of records and the received fax is consistent. We recommend to test out some example PDF forms you would want to read data from with different services to see how well they read them. One example is https://docparser.com/blog/pdf-salesforce-integration/ or Google has an API: https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/ocr . There are other options depending on what works best for you.

You can also setup a Console view in Salesforce to best go through a list of unprocessed received faxes and you click a received fax record in top frame and loads the fax PDF in the large frame below and then and easily update the related record fields you define in the left frame. This process allows for quick viewing and updating of records to create an efficient process of manual review. You need to do some analysis of the accuracy of OCR and the cost to get setup and decide what makes sense.