Obtain personal or financial information about customers or applicants
Most of the output can be produced by software today.
An agent can find, read and summarise the sources this work depends on, and it can cover far more of them than a person would ever open. What it does not do is decide which sources deserve trust, or what the findings mean for your situation.
| How automatable | Mostly automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Research and retrieval work |
| Jobs that do it | 12 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Web, data and docs, Generalist agents |
| O*NET activity | Getting Information (4.A.1.a.1) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 12 occupations that perform it.
- Trace delinquent customers to new addresses by inquiring at post offices, telephone companies, credit bureaus, or through the questioning of neighbors.
- Obtain and process information required for the provision of services, such as opening accounts, savings plans, and purchasing bonds.
- Obtain information about potential creditors from banks, credit bureaus, and other credit services, and provide reciprocal information if requested.
- Check with employers or other references to verify answers and obtain further information.
- Locate and list addresses and households.
- Contact credit bureaus, employers, and other sources to check applicants' credit and personal references.
- Obtain credit records from reporting agencies.
- Obtain customers' names, addresses, and billing information, product numbers, and specifications of items to be purchased, and enter this information on order forms.
- Request information from law enforcement officials, previous employers, and other references to determine applicants' employment acceptability.
- Search directories to find correct addresses for redirected mail.
- Assist attorneys in collecting information such as employment, medical, and other records.
- Obtain computer printout of policy cancellations, or retrieve cancellation cards from file.
- Receive charge slips or credit applications by mail, or receive information from salespeople or merchants by telephone.
- Conduct annual, interim, and special housing reviews and home visits to ensure conformance to regulations.
- Contact former employers and other acquaintances to verify applicants' references, employment, health history, or social behavior.
What we would actually use
One recommendation rather than a shortlist, because a shortlist is just your problem handed back. This is what we would buy for research and retrieval work, and what it costs.
Research is the one shape of work that needs no integration at all, so a single $20 assistant with browsing is the whole stack. Add a crawler only once you are pulling hundreds of pages on a schedule rather than reading a few.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Generalist agents
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
How people actually do it
No workflow names this activity yet, but these automate the same kind of work, with the prompts to paste and what to keep for yourself.
Who does this work
12 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Bill and Account Collectors
- Credit Authorizers, Checkers, and Clerks
- Eligibility Interviewers, Government Programs
- Human Resources Assistants, Except Payroll and Timekeeping
- Insurance Claims and Policy Processing Clerks
- Interviewers, Except Eligibility and Loan
- Legal Secretaries and Administrative Assistants
- Loan Interviewers and Clerks
- New Accounts Clerks
- Order Clerks
- Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors, and Processing Machine Operators
- Tellers
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Collect data about consumer needs or opinions”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.