eXpresso Enables Working Mothers – No, seriously
As a working mother, I think about issues related to balancing family and career all the time. I am very fortunate to have a job that I love that lets me work from home most days. But, until this week, I never thought about how eXpresso (the product, not just the company) enables working moms.
One of eXpresso’s first clients was software company that offers a product for real estate management. They have a marketing process that utilizes work-at- home moms for telemarketing. Although they use Salesforce.com for contact management, there are a lot of tasks that are still tracked in spreadsheets. Before eXpresso, there was a painful process of gathering and combining the information on the spreadsheets to keep it current and useful. “Am I looking at the newest version of the spreadsheet?” was the most common phrase in the office. Now, each telemarketer has access to the required spreadsheets. She updates them as needed and the marketing team has real time access to the data.
Just this week, I got a call from an eXpresso prospect. They are a research firm that also utilizes work-at- home moms to make calls to people participating in various studies. They don’t have a CRM system at all and rely on spreadsheets to track the results of each call as well as the time worked by each person. They literally have hundreds of spreadsheets flying around in email every day. Unfortunately, this means that the collated data in their final “master” spreadsheet is wrong more often than it is right. One solution actually being considered is changing the business model to have everyone work in the office where they can access spreadsheets and other systems on the network. How sad. eXpresso offers an alternative. Let everyone work from home, or really anywhere, and give them access to the spreadsheets they need. One spreadsheet, in one place, one version of reality.
I knew from the beginning that eXpresso would make my life as a work-at-home mother easier and it certainly has. I can participate in meetings where we collaborate on financial, sales and marketing data right from my home office. I can check my employees’ progress on projects any time I want. I’m gratified to know that other moms out there are benefiting as well. Now, if we could only figure out how to make it do laundry…
