Archive for May, 2009

Ribbit Named TMC 2008 Communications Solutions Product of the Year

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 | located in Awards | No Comments »

Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC) recognized Ribbit for Salesforce for outstanding innovation and enabling sales efficiency and named Ribbit as a recipient of a 2008 Communications Solutions Product of the Year Award.

The Communications Solutions Product of the Year Award recognizes the vision, leadership and attention to detail that are the hallmarks of the prestigious award. The most innovative products and services brought to market in 2008 were selected as recipients of this year’s Communications Solutions Product of the Year Award for their groundbreaking achievement. The 2008 Communications Solutions Product of the Year Award winners can be found on the INTERNET TELEPHONY and Customer Interaction Solutions websites.

Quotes:

• Rich Tehrani, TMC President and Group Editor-in-Chief: “Ribbit for Salesforce has been recognized with a 2008 Product of the Year Award for their excellence in the advancement of voice and data communications. Ribbit has proven they are committed to quality and excellence in solutions that benefit the customer experience as well as ROI for the companies that use them. I am pleased to honor their hard work and accomplishments, and look forward to more innovative solutions from them in the future.”
• Greg Goldfarb, GM of Enterprise Applications at Ribbit: “Being named a 2008 Communications Solutions Product of the Year demonstrates the value Ribbit for Salesforce brings to businesses across the U.S.. It’s more important than ever for salespeople to have the tools they need to build and maintain customer relationships, and successfully close deals. We appreciate the recognition for solving the core productivity challenges faced by the mobile workforce.”

Earlier this year, Ribbit for Salesforce was named the “Best Mobile App of 2008” on the salesforce.com AppExchange, based solely on salesforce.com customer reviews. Ribbit for Salesforce is an AppExchange Certified Application and is available to all U.S.-based salesforce.com customers using Professional Edition and above. For more information or to learn about Ribbit’s free 30-day free trial, please visit www.ribbit.com/salesforce.

Active lifestyle? Take Ribbit with you.

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 | located in Productivity | No Comments »

I lead a very active lifestyle—mountain biking, snow boarding, and soccer are my passions.

Between work, my 9-year-old daughter, and outdoor activities, I’m always on the go. And a lot of the time, I’m in areas where mobile reception is spotty, or taking a phone call just doesn’t make sense (ever try taking a phone call at soccer game?).

Ribbit helps me stay connected, so I can do my job well AND enjoy my outdoor lifestyle. I can receive voicemail messages as text messages—even in poor coverage areas—on my mobile phone. After I read the message I can decide to reply via text or forward the message on to someone else on my team to assist. This allows me to respond to questions and situations quickly so that I don’t slow things down or become a bottleneck.

We’re constantly improving the Ribbit platform, and everyone on the apps development team tends to work slightly different hours. So it’s important that we’re all available during the week. With Ribbit, I can bike through a rural canyon in the early evening and not worry about whether the apps team working late at the office will be able to reach me.

Speak, Copy, Paste, Format, Send

Thursday, May 7th, 2009 | located in Productivity, Salesforce | 1 Comment »

Have you ever been driving to work or a meeting and realized you forgot to send someone a follow-up email?

Maybe you had a new thought or strategy that you wanted to share with someone but had to wait a bit before you could log into your computer to whip up an email. How frustrating is that? How many emails never get written because you either forgot or told yourself you would “do it later”?

One of the things I find myself doing on a daily basis is giving myself a list of emails to “write” as I commute to our HQ in Mt. View, CA. Since my daily commute is just over an hour each way, you can imagine how many emails I could send. This could be an email to one of my customers saying “thanks” or perhaps I need to write a new prospect that just test drove Ribbit from the AppExchange. It could be that I want to say “Thanks for your time today” after a demo or sales pitch?

I don’t drive a special car by the way nor do I use my iPhone to type while driving (hello $300 ticket). How do I do this? Simple! I use Ribbit!!

Since Ribbit allows voice messages up to 3 minutes (that can be left by myself using * + ‘5’ in the Ribbit Voice Menu), I can dictate an email right from the drivers seat while speaking into my mobile phone via Bluetooth headset. Once I complete the message, Ribbit transcribes the call to text and then delivers the message to my email (and puts a copy in salesforce.com).

When I get to my office, fire open my email, I can see all the new messages I have left myself. At this point, all I have to do is Copy, Paste, Format & Send! Simple.

Here is an email I dictated to my friend (and Partner) at Model Metrics, Sachin Saste.

(Image 1: Email copy of the transcripted voicemail)

(Image 2: Highlight the transcription and copy it to the clipboard)

(Image 3: Paste the transcripted text into a new email.)

(Image 4: Format the email & clean up any language or punctuation. Then click send. Done.)

Jeff Kaplan Discusses Mobility and SaaS on Webinar Next Week

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 | located in Events, Salesforce | No Comments »

Ribbit for Salesforce is hosting a webinar on Thursday, May 14th at 9 am PST, featuring Jeff Kaplan from THINKstrategies where we discuss mobility in the SaaS space.

We will also be joined by Will Stacy, from Santander Consumer USA (aka Drive Financial) who will share how their sales team has increased sales productivity within their field sales team, using with Ribbit for Salesforce. Check it out!

Here’s how to register:  https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/446385693

Ribbit Provides ‘Freedom in the Field’

Monday, May 4th, 2009 | located in Articles and Media Mentions, Productivity | No Comments »

Adam Boretz from Speech Technology Magazine just penned a really nice article entitled “Freedom in the Field” that highlights the benefits of integrating speech solutions into the workflow of employees out in the field and gives Ribbit for Salesforce a nice shout in this piece:

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Ribbit for Salesforce revolves around three fundamental challenges to productivity:

1. enabling salespeople to be more responsive to customers and therefore more competitive;
2. facilitating information sharing and accelerating collaboration between workers in the office and workers in the field;
3. facilitating higher visibility of customer interactions when disparate devices, software, and technology are being used.

Ribbit for Salesforce brings together day-to-day sales tools like mobile phones, email, Salesforce.com, and text messaging and ties these different information portals together via voice-to-text technology.

It works like this:

• If a saleswoman is in a meeting, all her voicemail is converted to text and sent to her mobile device so she can address pressing matters and improve responsiveness.
• Once the meeting is over, she can hop into her car, access her mobile device, and speak her meeting notes.
• The content gets converted to text and entered into the company’s CRM system.
• When this is finished, the saleswoman can continue to drive while she uses her mobile device to call in and dictate a draft of an email.
• Upon returning to her office, she can sit down at her desk and open up Ribbit for Salesforce on her computer.
• Now, she can edit and send the email, look at customer records, and check messages—the system stores them as both text and voice files—that partners or customers may have left.

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Read the whole article as it provides several good arguments for adapting technology to help solve these workflow ‘pains’ and provides some solid use cases as well.