How we built something useful for sales teams

The product launch process reminds me a lot of my 20-something self & the adventurous road trips I used to live for 🚗 

There are moments of inspiring breakthroughs, moments of pure chaos, moments of mundane, and everything in between. Today, in my product marketing life, the most rewarding moments come from when we know that we are building something truly useful to our target users.

Last month, we shipped a product called RingSense that was exactly that: Incredibly useful.

How do I know it’s useful? The clear line from problem to solution. From prior state (unstructured data chaos) to end state (effortless extraction of insights from data). From a lot of time and manual sifting to automation and focused insights. From creating work to eliminating work.

So let's trace RingSense back to the initial Aha moment of the idea 👇👇

It always starts with a frustration. This is a great place to start any feature or product. In fact, the closer you start to frustration, the more fuel you have to light the solution.

What was frustrating? Over 100 billion business calls are made globally every year - and thanks to the pandemic - every year, a bigger percentage of them are recorded. People are hungry to leverage this data, they know there are valuable insights in these recorded conversations, but how? The data is unstructured, and transcripts are simply a reference, a compliant way to store archives. Transcripts are not a scalable way to understand what happened and extract all the value from these conversations. 

If we are being honest - our customer-facing teams are swimming in conversational chaos. We struggle to find efficiencies and increase the top-line in today’s macro. We have the data, but never seem to hear the voice of our customer across our organization and make the right connections.

We lack visibility into the interactions that span our customer lifecycle. Searching through a disorganized transcript is useless. People don’t have time for that. Even if I did find something interesting, what actions should I take and when? 

Coaching, learning, and developing best practices takes time and we can’t respond to change fast enough. Humans are imperfect and complex. Change is difficult, and mistakes are common.

It’s a burden but also an opportunity 💡

So what do users want? We concluded that in an ideal state, users want to automatically extract more value from these recorded conversations. 

In today’s climate of “do more with less”, using technology to automate customer insights remains a crucial investment. Further leveraging the ever-shiny, latest buzzword of the year - generative AI - to speed cycles of mission critical organizations - like customer facing teams - is the ultimate driver of productivity, efficiency and ROI. 

Almost a year later, with a small tiger team of a talented product leader, tireless engineers and relentlessly pushy PMMs hounding on clarity of messaging, positioning, and differentiation - we have it. It’s called RingSense and it tames communication chaos. And now all RingCentral customers have the ability to have it too.

RingSense is a conversation intelligence solution for revenue teams like sales & marketing to improve quality of customer interactions and insights through AI-powered coaching, deal intelligence & revenue insights. RingSense automatically analyzes interactions between sales reps and prospects to organize & surface key insights, the needle in the haystack moments that help revenue teams hit quota at lightning speed.

It's as fast as checking your favourite team’s ESPN dashboard, and now the "too much unstructured data" problem is dissolved. What was debilitating is now delightful.

That's the joy of building software. That's why we do what we do. RingSense is an outstanding product. It’s rooted in real world problems, eliminating real sales rep and leader frustrations, and flipping recordings into revenue at lightning speed.

If you're a customer in our beta program, we hope you find RingSense useful. If you're not using RingSense yet, now's the perfect time to dive in and take back control of your time, attention and focus.

Want to join our beta? Click here.

-Ashima