Archive for the ‘Articles and Media Mentions’ Category

Article: Destination CRM highlights enterprise use of Ribbit

Monday, May 17th, 2010 | located in Articles and Media Mentions, Productivity | No Comments »

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.”

Ribbit gives eBizQ the 411 on Trends in Mobile CRM

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 | located in Articles and Media Mentions, SME Trends | No Comments »

eBizQ recently interviewed Ribbit’s own Greg Goldfarb, VP and General Manager of Enterprise Applications, to find out how mobile CRM is evolving and how it’s being used today. Among many observations, Greg shared the following with eBizQ editor Peter Schoof.

• Greater automation is helping to make CRM more dynamic—user-specific, relevant data can now be pushed out to users (as opposed to users digging for relevant data themselves).
• Integrated voice and text messaging is solving the problem of how to get information from the CRM system out to salespeople in the field effectively and efficiently.
• CRM is becoming a more of a collaboration environment than a sales reporting system, rapidly linking mobile field sales people to those working in the office.

You can also read the transcript and listen to the entire interview here.

Ribbit for Salesforce Featured in SellingPower.com

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 | located in Articles and Media Mentions, Productivity | No Comments »

Ribbit just received a nice little nod in the SellingPower.com Salesforce Newsletter that highlighted how our service     transforms voice mail into a power tool for sales professionals.

From their newsletter:

After you get the service activated, voice messages from you, and calls from customers to your existing mobile number are routed through Ribbit’s servers, where they are converted into readable text. That text then flows directly into your salesforce.com system. The textual representation is stored in a “Messages” custom object (stored in your salesforce account) along with a link to the actual audio files, which are maintained on Ribbit’s servers.

You can dial into the main Ribbit number to easily listen to and navigate through all your messages. If you’re tracking all your customer-facing activities, the call is automatically logged, saving you an extra CRM step. You can also use the system to record your own meeting notes while you’re on the road. Then, when you’re working on that customer account, you’ve already got a reasonably good textual transcription in your salesforce.com database without having to manually transcribe your notes.

More importantly, you get all your voice information collected in one place. When you are back in the office, your transcribed notes and messages are already in your salesforce.com database. You can search, track, and manage voice notes, voice mails, and calls – right alongside the customer data in salesforce. That means an end to the scribbled notes, lost voice mails, and endless email archives that are such a big a part of many sales environments.

To read the entire article, please visit SellingPower.com. If you are not currently subscribed to their service, they will ask you to register (free) before taking you to the article.

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.