You may have heard about The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, or the idea of an MVP (minimum viable product). These methodologies say only build what subscribers ask—and will pay— for. Business app development isn’t a one-way street; sometimes a customer will come to you with an idea for a product you wouldn’t otherwise have had in your cycle. When that happens, a responsive company with a close relationship to its customers will be able to deliver something new. Such was the case when financial advisory firm White Glove came to Fastcall with a request regarding Einstein Conversation Insights.
Salesforce recently introduced Einstein Conversation Insights. ECI transcribes a recorded conversation, identifies keywords and records metrics (such as talk time per recipient) from phone calls, and provides recording shortcuts to quickly review the calls. Rob Lyons, head of technology for White Glove, identified a natural fit for ECI with his company’s existing use of Fastcall. “I saw this feature was available to us as HVS users,” Lyons says. “I wanted to see if this AI could give me insight into our sales calls beyond standard activity logging.”
Such requests are part of the job for Fastcall founder Rich Rosen, and they often spring from curiosity. “Subscribers ask us for stuff they do not really plan to implement,” Rosen says. “We do the work, it does not get used, but is available for the next subscriber.” Even so, this is where innovation is born. “It was worth doing as this is a differentiator,” Rosen says. “Not many other CTI apps have the integration. And it gave us a chance to reach out to the Sales Cloud product team at Salesforce. That’s always a good thing.”
Lyons’ request, “tracking to make sure that every interested lead is turned into an opportunity,” combined simple curiosity with the possibility of delivering real business value for White Glove, and a marketable product for Fastcall. “That is a driver in marketing, the perception of solving a problem,” Rosen says.
The ECI framework is built on top of Salesforce and Tableau CRM, which is the result of Salesforce’s 2019 acquisition of Tableau, a company building a self-service analytics platform. “However, the best thing about ECI is that it’s built in a way that is agnostic about the source of the call recordings analyzed,” says Antonio Grassi, CTO and co-founder of Fastcall. “These recordings can be uploaded to the ECI platform through the standard Salesforce REST API, from an external system, or from native Salesforce applications like Fastcall.”
Fastcall’s development team was ready to get to work as soon as the project kicked off, with little to no ramp-up. “We follow with close attention the new features released by Salesforce, and we try to adopt those that add value to our solution, as early as possible, usually starting work when these Salesforce features are still in Beta or pilot programs,” Grassi says.
As a Salesforce-only provider, Fastcall needed less than a month to take its integration with Einstein Conversation Insights from inception to delivery. Fastcall recordings are fed to the ECI platform in real time, returning helpful conversation insights to users of the new add-on.
White Glove received the desired conversation insights as well as daily overviews for managers, auto-generated by Fastcall and ECI. A further capability, analyzing past calls in bulk in ECI, is currently in progress, and both parties are confident of a similarly short rollout time frame. Salesforce plans to make ECI available to all subscribers, not just those using the High Velocity Sales module, so what began life as a speculative project for White Glove could soon become a sales tool for all Fastcall users.
thomas.wieberneit@aheadcrm.co.nz
