Business Card Scanner: Capture a Contact From a Card

How do I capture a contact from a business card?

Add a Business Card Scanner question to the form. In the Survtapp mobile app, the person collecting photographs the card, the details are read and filled in, and a confirmation step shows what was read so any field can be corrected before it is saved. It works in the mobile app only, and a form can have one.

The Business Card Scanner turns a card somebody just handed you into a contact record without typing it. The person collecting takes a photograph of the card in the Survtapp mobile app, the details are read off it and filled in, and a confirmation step shows you what was read before anything is saved.

What the person collecting sees

1. Open the form in the Survtapp mobile app and reach the Business Card Scanner question.
2. Photograph the card. Flat, filled to the frame and in reasonable light reads best; a glossy card may need the angle changing to kill the reflection.
3. Check the fields on the confirmation sheet. Every one of them is editable, so a misread name or a transposed digit is corrected there and then.
4. Confirm. Only at this point is anything stored.

The confirmation step cannot be skipped. That is deliberate: a card is somebody else’s contact details, and the person who accepted the card is the only one in a position to notice that the phone number came out wrong. Reviewing on the spot is far cheaper than finding out weeks later from a bounced email.

Adding it to a form

• Add the Business Card Scanner from the question palette in the form builder, the same way as any other question.
• Map it to the contact fields you want the card to fill — name, email, phone, company and so on. Anything on the card that has nowhere to go is simply not kept.
• A form may contain at most one Business Card Scanner. Once a form has one, the palette entry is disabled and says why. One card, one contact: a second scanner on the same form would produce two half-filled contacts from one conversation.

It needs the mobile app

A Business Card Scanner question can only be answered in the Survtapp mobile app. The form itself is still perfectly shareable as a web link and every other question on it works normally — the web page shows a short note in place of this one question rather than an input nobody can complete, and the response still submits. If a form has to be completed entirely through a web link, leave the Business Card Scanner off it and collect the contact details as ordinary fields instead.

Where the card and the contact end up

• The confirmed details are saved with the response and flow into your contacts like any other captured contact.
• The photograph of the card is stored with the response and is not published on a public URL — it is reachable only to people signed in to your account who can already see the response it belongs to.
• Deleting the response, an erasure request, and your plan’s retention period all cover the card image exactly as they cover any other answer.

See Question Types & Form Components Reference for the full list of question types, and Data & Privacy Requests for how erasure works.