Automated crowdsourcing
What is automated crowdsourcing?
Crowdsourcing is “the act of giving tasks to a large group of people, for example, by asking for help on the internet, rather than having tasks done within a company by employees” (Cambridge Dictionary). In some cases, this can be automated.
What are the advantages of automated crowdsourcing?
- Flexibility and Scalability
At a time of intense staff shortages, automated crowdsourcing allows you to scale your workforce on demand.
- Cost reduction
With an automated crowdsourcing verification tool such as ScaleHub, manual data verification costs can be reduced by more than 50%.
- Accuracy
By using automated crowdsourcing for data entry and verification, a solution such as ScaleHub can guarantee 99% data accuracy. Rather than relying on one employee to enter or verify data correctly, the data is sent to at least two crowd contributors. If their results match, it’s considered correct. In the case of a mismatch, the problematic image is sent to a third more experienced contributor for a tiebreaker.
- Speed
With ScaleHub, data is automatically distributed all over the world to qualified crowd contributors from a network of 2.3 million. This reduces cycle times and improves customer satisfaction.
What are some applications for automated crowdsourcing?
- Data verification
- Data entry
- Prescription processing
- Tax form automation
- Forms processing
- Mailroom automation
- Emergency preparedness
- Individual solutions
How can automated crowdsourcing be used for data verification?
The application of automated crowdsourcing to data verification allows companies to process their data faster, safer and more accurately. ScaleHub makes this possible using a process called snipetting, whereby a document is cut into smaller pieces called “snippets”.
Use case - Processing a Tax form
A tax form has information which needs to be entered into a record system. This could be done by one employee, but it is a monotonous task which will take a lot of time and with a high risk of mistakes being made. In addition, giving one employee access to a form in its entirety is a data privacy risk. By cutting the form into fields, the larger task of entering form data is broken down into many smaller tasks that crowd contributors can work on simultaneously in seconds. Snipetting is key to keeping customer data secure because crowd contributors only see a part of the document, never the whole.
How automated crowdsourcing can be used for data entry
Data entry is an ideal task for the crowd if it’s done correctly. ScaleHub’s crowdsourcing solution simplifies data entry making it massively scalable.
Documents are cut into smaller pieces, most often fields. In an instant, those fields are grouped by category and distributed worldwide to qualified crowd contributors from a network of 2.3 million. Each crowd contributor sees a short task description accompanied by images of form fields. Using an intuitive interface, they enter what they see in those fields. In order to be able to guarantee 99% data accuracy, the same batch of fields is automatically sent to a second crowd contributor. If their results match, it’s considered correct. In the case of a mismatch, the problematic image is sent to a third more experienced contributor for a tiebreaker.
Crowdsourcing & Data Privacy
In the use cases above, many crowd contributors work on the documents at the same time, but since those documents are broken into smaller pieces before sending to the crowd, no one person ever sees a complete document. This is how ScaleHub has made data entry of highly sensitive information safer in the crowd than anywhere else.
What to look for when selecting a crowdsourcing solution?
A key consideration when choosing a crowdsourcing solution is data privacy. Therefore it is important to ensure that the solution is compliant with the most stringent regulations.
ScaleHub is ISO 27001, HIPAA, and GDPR compliant and offers the option to record every keystroke and mouse click the crowd contributors make.
Before sending data to the crowd, it is broken into pieces. For example, a driver’s license contains personal data like name, address, date of birth and license number, but once these data points are snippetted and separated from context, they carry no risk. And the most sensitive personal information can be scrambled before it’s sent to the crowd.
Build your own crowd
Sometimes you may need the person processing the data to see all the information together, for example with an insurance claim, or you maybe you want to crowdsource data entry but only from within your outsourcing service provider’s workforce. In these cases, ScaleHub can configure a protected private crowd. For restrictions on where data can be processed, ScaleHub can configure its solution to only enlist crowd contributors from certain locations.
