Article: Destination CRM highlights enterprise use of Ribbit

May 17th, 2010 by Kristie Wells | located in Articles and Media Mentions, Productivity | trackback

Adam Boretz, from Speech Technology magazine, digs into Ribbit’s speech technology and highlights two enterprise clients benefiting from their use of Ribbit for Salesforce - Delta Dental and Selling Power.

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(1) Delta Dental of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Tennessee: Adam interviewed Kevin Edelman, CRM product solutions administrator who said, ”I saw [Ribbit] at the [Dreamforce 2007] tradeshow and saw a value in [Ribbit for Salesforce], where sales reps could leave themselves messages and record their activities that way.”

Since then, Edelman has seen the company evolve. He successfully implemented Ribbit for Salesforce at Delta Dental, where about 40 sales reps use it mostly to receive transcripts of their voicemail messages on their mobile phones and to record memos and email drafts via voice. He estimates that Delta uses the technology to process 500 to 700 messages per month.

“I think [Ribbit] is very aggressive in coming together with some really great things,” he says. “They’ve been adding a lot of different functionalities over the last year and a half…. It was good before, but now it’s even better.”

Edelman says reaction to Ribbit has been positive at Delta, but admits that adoption has been slower than anticipated — with some older, less-tech-savvy salespeople resisting the new technology. Nonetheless, he remains very positive and suggests that enterprises start small when deploying Ribbit.

“Roll it out division by division,” he says. “Have a plan for continuous education…. Find a power user in each division so they can then take over the championship of that application.”

Recently, Edelman and Delta expanded their use of Ribbit, tying office voicemail to Ribbit for Salesforce — something he calls a big success. “The sales staff has a single point of entry for all their voicemail,” he says. “Everything gets recorded. Everything gets reported. It has improved our response time on critical issues and I have some managers that will swear by it.”

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(2) Selling Power, a publication currently read by more than 420,000 sales leaders and producer of the biannual Sales Leadership Conference series. Adam spoke with Marcel Sendejo, a regional manager who works remotely from Austin, Texas, and uses the solution when he is on the road to dictate notes into Salesforce and to keep up with voicemail messages. Like Edelman, Sendejo learned about Ribbit at Dreamforce and has had a relationship with the company ever since.

“It’s just an organization tool that I pretty much can’t live without now,” he says, adding that he will walk out of a meeting and begin dictating notes immediately. “It helps me to be efficient. It helps me to be very organized.”

Sendejo says Ribbit prevents him from having to log on to Salesforce and play catch-up after a long day on the road and allows his supervisors to keep tabs on his accounts without phone calls or additional meetings.

“The main thing [is] the convenience,” he says. “The transcription is ideal. It’s just a huge time saver…. I love the dictation aspect. The big story for me [is] time savings. And not having to do administrative work to keep everybody else in the loop.”

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Nice words from Salesforce.com:

Scott Holden, director of product marketing, and Al Falcione, senior director of product marketing, are also impressed with what they’ve seen from Ribbit. ”It’s a pretty amazing solution,” Falcione says. Holden agrees, noting that Ribbit is one of the most highly rated applications by customers using Salesforce’s app exchange.

“If you look at just the ratings that the Ribbit application gets, it averages a 4.7 out of 5,” he says. “And everything people say is really sort of game-changing about how they interact with the telephone and their voicemail and how they attach those voicemail and texts inside Salesforce.”

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