An Enterprise Phone System
Truly is a tool built for top-performing sales teams, focusing on reps who handle multi-million dollar deals.
The Problem.
While Truly’s mission is to focus on delivering value to top-performing sales teams, there was a real opportunity to do better in coaching specifically.
New Tools: Since Truly entered the market, new coaching tools like Chorus and Gong gained traction. These tools leverage transcription to make coaching a much quicker task, automatically highlighting areas of calls that likely need attention.
Potential Budget Loss: One of our customers was exploring other solutions for coaching within their sales org, and considering shifting some of Truly’s budget to these products.
A question arose of whether Truly had a reasonable path to compete in the transcription space while leveraging the benefits of our existing platform.
User Research
I worked directly with top sales teams to understand how they approached coaching within their orgs. Some specific pain points that came up were:
Not enough coaching hours to give every rep the attention they need to grow.
Making sure compliance disclaimers are given by reps on calls, e.g. “this call is going to be recorded”.
Big focus on automatic nature of tools, don’t want “things to get in the way of their day-to-day” but still want the value those tools bring.
Manual process of cross-referencing coaching spreadsheets and calls stored in Chorus/Gong.
Prioritization
To prioritize designs for Truly’s take on call coaching I focused in on:
Value add from the Truly ecosystem: how can we add value beyond what other transcription platforms do thanks to our tight Salesforce integration?
Enabling our customer coaching goals
Reasonable cost to build on the engineering side
Tagging: Timestamps markers of potential coaching opportunities. For example, when a particular product area is mentioned. This particular feature would be strengthened hugely by Truly’s core Salesforce integration.
Media Player: There was ultimately a need for a player where recordings would be viewable in a way that presented coaching goals to reps.
Transcript Search: While competing tools offered a way to search calls for any kind of term, I chose to deprioritize this to focus on tagging--a method that allowed common goals to be tracked across a team versus this more individual method.
Sharing: Competing offerings were very feature-rich in regard to sharing, but this method was not compatible with executives goal of having one accurate system of record.
Design Iterations
Overall, call coaching needed to focus on tagging, with an additional need for a media player to surface information to reps on any particular call. Additional considerations that came from customer discussions included:
Speaker Separation: As coaching often focuses in on one person
Video Included: Reactions are an important part of the story
Customizable tags are denoted along the main media scrubber. Hovering near a particular tag displays which type of tag it is.
Initially, speaker separation was contained in one media scrubber bar. A popover would display who was talking at any given time. In tests, however, this was confusing to users trying to find when a certain person was talking.
Speaker separation was revised to be more discrete after early tests with our pilot customer. Each speaker was listed individually, sorted by talk-time on the call. This allowed users to focus on a particular person to coach.Successes
90% of pilot customer coaching goals met: versus 60% of coaching goals met by competing transcription tools.
20% budget increase with pilot customer: instead of 30% budget compaction originally being explored.
