We speak a lot on how Rev’s products can benefit different industries and departments but what we don’t always address is how often we use it company-wide! So, we thought it would be fun to take it internally and discuss how Rev’s employees use our own offerings to improve engagement, workflow process and efficiency, and campaign performance. 

In today’s post, we interview Frankie Lewis, Rev’s Product Marketing Manager for our Pay-as-You-Go customers, in which she discusses how she uses Rev transcripts to conduct customer research. 

Chelsea: Let’s get started with the basics so everyone can learn a bit about you and your role within the Rev organization. You’ve been with Rev for four years now and in a few different roles. What’s your current position, and how has it evolved over time? 

Frankie: I am currently a product marketing manager focused on our self-serve customer base. When I first started at Rev, I was on our sales team, working as an SDR, sales development representative. I was on the front end of the sales process, bringing in new leads for the sales team to work. 

Then, I moved to our sales operations team. And then, I moved into marketing where I did events for over a year before moving into product marketing, where I’ve now been for the last year and a half.

C: A few different places before finding your niche. Now, tell me about how you personally use Rev.

F:  In my current role, I spend a large focus each quarter on customer research, which means I’m doing multiple interviews a week, could be as short as 30 minutes, or it can be an hour-long interview where I may be digging into a certain industry that we serve and want to understand the buyers within that industry. Or maybe I’m trying to uncover product needs within a certain segment of our customers.

I really can’t imagine not having a transcript when I’m doing these interviews, because I am someone that…if I could, I would write everything down, but then, I would probably lose half of what the customer was saying. Also, almost more importantly, they’ll be more themselves and share more insightful pieces on how they use Rev or on their pain points, if it’s just a conversation. Simply having a conversation is important because it helps me to connect with customers in these interviews.

C: Besides saving you time, how does transcription benefit your collaboration across Rev?

F: Being in product marketing, you’re often at the center of all the product, marketing, sales, and operations teams. A huge part of these interviews is not just for my own knowledge, but to then share it with other people. Whether that’s to train the sales team on how they’re going to speak to these buyers or to train the marketing team so they know how to create effective content or create great demand gen campaigns or to highlight gaps in our product for the product team.

For example, I often will do an interview with someone and think, “Oh, person X on our team would really benefit from listening to this.” I can share the transcript link directly from the transcript editor with that person. I can highlight certain pieces that I want them to check out, or I may go through the transcript editor and highlight stuff myself, pull that out into a separate document, and share that document with others. 

But I’m often sharing direct quotes or snippets of the interview, so people can really hear the voice of the customer, not just have it coming through me or my interpretation of it.

C: Can you possibly quantify the ROI you see from using transcription, for example, the number of hours you save?

F: For this specific study I recently did, I completed 25 interviews that were each 45 minutes long. It would probably take me three hours to transcribe one 45-minute interview.

Within a month and a half, that’s 75 hours. Then, I would still need to spend time actually identifying and surfacing insights. Yeah, I really can’t imagine not having a transcript to reference.

C: So you definitely have plenty of experience using our products. On the other side, what have been some pain points you’ve noticed with the self-serve Rev customers that you’ve interacted with?

F: Probably, the biggest one is the trade-off between quality and turnaround time. A lot of our self-serve customers don’t have a ton of resources to spend time going through a transcript or a caption file after they’ve done it to make sure it meets the high-quality standard that they want.

C: Let’s talk for a minute about how top-of-mind speech-to-text has become for businesses everywhere. What have you noticed about the trends that have emerged within the speech-to-text industry and the Rev features that support those needs?

F: Transcripts have been our bread and butter for a long time. We have a huge section of our use case for transcripts that’s research. That can be market research, that can be product marketing research, it could be academic research.

Thankfully, you can do research wherever you are, so that’s just continued to evolve, as well as I think becoming even more important in a business setting where people are spending so much time on Zoom. That’s why a lot of our focus has been on how transcripts be a tool for people to work smarter.

Maybe they’re on their eighth meeting of the day, and now they have a transcript that they can reference after. That was a huge reason why we built Rev Meeting Assistant. We were thinking to ourselves “how can we make all-day meetings a little less painful?”

C: There are so many speech-to-text tools available for decision-makers. How do you communicate to customers, the differentiators that set Rev apart?

F: The thing that sets the Rev apart is that you don’t have to choose. We have an incredibly fast turnaround time and we have industry-leading accuracy–all without having to raise the price high. Really that’s because of our unique combination of the largest marketplace of transcriptionists and captioners that are working, as well as our industry-leading engine.

C: The symbiosis is definitely self-sustaining. I’ve always thought that is really fascinating. Finally, what are some out-of-the-box use cases or companies that you’ve seen using transcription?

F: I tell people that every day, I find another use case for Rev, and I thought I’d heard of all of them. I had a few interviews recently of ghostwriters that are using Rev. So, they’re doing extensive interviews, and then trying to take all those interviews, and consolidate them into written content. 

I’ve spoken to people that are the actual ghostwriter themselves. I’ve also spoken to people that manage the group of ghostwriters and are trying to make their process faster. I think that’s unique, especially because it’s often across a variety of industries that they’re serving. And could be pretty high-profile people that they’re writing for.

C: Well, I think that about covers it. On behalf of the content team at Rev, we have definitely learned a lot. Thanks for your time, Frankie!