* EvaForHire assists with natural, not artificial, intelligence
Wouldn’t life be easier with a personal assistant following you around taking notes, changing your calendar and sending e-mails as you dictated them? Sounds great, especially for salespeople and others constantly on the move, except for the little fact that you would have to pay them. As an alternative, consider Electronic Virtual Assistant, which costs pennies per hour rather than thousands per month.
E.V.A. developed from a service for salespeople that provided fast transcriptions from phone reports. Voice2Insight takes messages over the phone, transcribes them, and sends the report to the salesperson and/or sales management. Makes perfect sense, because many salespeople love to talk but hate to type. E.V.A. takes the next step and uses trained transcribers to go beyond sales notes and make entries to the customer’s Outlook database.
You can watch the video at E.V.A., but here’s how things work. Our hero, Intrepid Salesperson, finishes a call with a hot prospect. Outstanding salespeople follow up with a thank you e-mail, make notes about the conversation, schedule the next meeting, and prepare answers to any prospect questions. Typical salespeople drive to their next appointment, leaving all those painful details for later.
E.V.A. clients call the service to leave a detailed message about e-mails to create, schedule additions and meeting notes. Someone at E.V.A. transcribes the information directly into Intrepid Salesperson’s Outlook database, including creating a new contact record if necessary. E-mails usually process in less than an hour, so the prospect may have a follow up message before Intrepid Salesperson reaches the next appointment.
I think E.V.A. leverages several smart ideas. First, while a personal assistant costs a full salary, they offer a personal assistant priced by the hour starting at $69.95 per month for 20 minutes of transcription time. As an example, a 400 word podcast takes me about two and a half minutes to read, so you can cram plenty of information into 20 dictated minutes.
Second, using real people rather than fighting with unreliable voice recognition software (especially over cell phone connections) pushes the quality up to nearly perfect. Incoming messages spool to hard disks, avoiding the hassles of real-time dictation and making it easy to replay hard to hear sections.
Finally, Outlook is a good place to start because so many people use it. E.V.A. says it plans to expand to other sales support systems like Salesforce.com, Seibel, ACT!, and NetSuite, but most salespeople already use Outlook, and these other systems already integrate with Outlook. A recent upgrade more tightly synchronizes the Outlook database kept at E.V.A. and a client’s own database on computer or PDA. Rather than hosting Outlook, E.V.A. sends updated database records to the client, or the client clicks a button on their own Outlook application to synchronize with E.V.A.
Could a midsized company do all this themselves? Sure. Hire a person or two, give them a network connection into the sales tracking software, and let employees leave messages in voicemail for transcription. But that means at least one full time employee, or more if you want to provide support after hours. That also means a backup employee, or two, plus all the benefits. You can make this work if you have enough salespeople, but outsourcing it makes good financial sense.
Most sales managers I know would happily spend an extra $200 per salesperson per month to get better sales meeting records and customer follow up. Salespeople, especially the good ones, want to go out and talk to more customers, not type into the database. That’s why some companies use inside salespeople for follow up details ignored by the outside salespeople.
I also like the combination of real people and automation E.V.A. uses. Using technology to leverage people time means each in-house transcriber can process dozens of messages per day and stay busy handling the message queue. No dead time for the real people, and excellent support response for the salespeople out in the field. Salespeople do what they like, talk, and management gets better records. Sounds like a winning combination from all angles.
