The technology in a digital card rollout is the easy part, which is exactly why teams underestimate everything else.
I have watched rollouts stall four times for the same four reasons. None of them are technical and all four are decidable in an afternoon, if you decide them before ordering rather than after.
Decide who owns the profile
This is the decision that saves you a year of mess, and almost nobody makes it deliberately.
If the company owns the profile, then when a salesperson leaves, you edit it to point at whoever inherits the accounts. Every card that person handed out over two years keeps working, and it now reaches somebody who can help. That is a real asset and it is invisible until the day you need it.
If the person owns it, the profile leaves when they do, along with everything printed on it.
Both are legitimate. A partner in a professional firm should probably own their own. A twenty person sales team probably should not. What is not legitimate is finding out which one you chose during somebody's notice period.
Make the call, write it in one line, and put it in the onboarding doc.
Fill the profiles before you hand out the cards
A card handed out with an empty profile is worse than no card, because the failure is public. Somebody taps it in front of a client and gets a placeholder.
Do not distribute cards and then ask everyone to please complete their profile. Some will, most will not, and you will spend a month chasing it.
Fill them centrally. Name, title, company, phone, the company link, and a photo, done in a batch by one person from data you already hold in HR. Then hand people a card that already works and tell them to fix anything that is wrong. Correcting something is a much easier ask than creating something.
The photo is the item that gets skipped and it is the one that matters most, because the entire purpose is that the recipient met this person an hour ago and is trying to keep hold of the face.
Give them a sentence to say
This is the one people find surprising, and it is the biggest single cause of a team not using the cards.
Somebody is in a meeting, holding a card that does something new, and they do not know what to say. So they hand it over like a normal card and the whole thing is dead.
Give them the line. Something plain: may I put my details straight into your phone. Then they tap it, and the contact is saved. Practise it once in a team meeting, in the room, out loud, in front of each other. It feels ridiculous for about ninety seconds and it converts a card into a habit.
In Japan, add the ordering explicitly: present the paper card properly first, both hands, and offer the tap later, when contact details come up naturally. Say that out loud too, because somebody will otherwise lead with the tap in a first meeting and nobody will tell them it was wrong.
Review at four weeks with the sales lead
Not with IT. The failure modes here are behavioural, and IT cannot see any of them.
Three questions at the four week mark. Who has not used theirs at all, and why. Whose profile is still wrong. And what did people actually say in the moment, which usually turns up one phrasing that works better than the one you gave them.
You are looking for the person who has the card in a drawer because they tried it once, it did not work on somebody's phone, and they quietly stopped. That person exists in every rollout and they will not raise it.
Do not wait for the CRM integration
The most common way a rollout never happens is waiting until it can be wired into the CRM properly.
Start with the cards working. Get a team using them for a quarter and find out whether the contacts are actually reaching the pipeline. If they are, you will know exactly what to automate and why. If they are not, you have saved yourself an integration for a workflow nobody adopted.
Every rollout I have seen fail, failed at the human end. None of them failed because the data was not flowing into Salesforce.