Gartner Recognizes Voice-Driven Sales Apps as a High Impact Technology for Life Sciences

Gartner’s latest Hype Cycle report of emerging technologies for Commercial Life Sciences notes “Voice-Driven Sales Apps” have potential to mature rapidly as it is recognized as a high-impact technology for improving sales productivity and the adoption of sales force automation tools.

Tact.ai is mentioned as an example of a company with a virtual sales assistant for field teams. Life Sciences is one of the industries that stands to benefit the most from voice-driven tools that understand natural language and can talk back with an understanding of the engagement process, the HCP’s contact preferences, and other insights to improve the customer experience.

In pharma, reps “detail” samples, clinical results, coverage updates and more when interacting with HCPs.

Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Life Science Commercial Operations, 2020 focuses on commercial operations (separate reports cover the important technologies for research and development) . The hype cycle is Gartner’s model fand the tools used to transform traditional models in the industry into more modern, digital businesses. With the pandemic driving and accelerating these changes, Gartner even predicted technologies like Voice-Driven Sales Apps would hit an “earlier maturity point than was previously predicted.”

Voice technology “has the potential to significantly increase the adoption of SFA systems by the sales force,” according to Gartner’s analysis. “It improves the timeliness, quality and relevance of data residing within those systems by providing a convenient way to register common actions, details and observations from the field via mobile applications. Overall, when effectively deployed, such implementations can improve individual productivity by offering a more accessible alternative for documenting sales activities and outcomes, thus freeing up more time for selling.”

As technologies like Tact serve as the front-end for CRM, we also designed our voice assistant to integrate with other tools like IQVIA, next best action, and tools on personal devices like calendar, email and tasks so reps have an all-in-one, unified app to go to instead of having to log in and out of multiple apps. We’ve also designed it to be multilingual, because our customers are global, with Tact Assistant supporting Spanish, French, Chinese, Japanese and more languages.

As large CRM vendors like Salesforce move away from voice (such as the recent end of support for Einstein Voice Assistant) products like Tact needs to remain interopable in order to remain sticky. Working with several different technologies on the backend to deliver a single pane of glass to users in critical to any voice application; if all you could do was order products from Amazon.com on the Alexa, it wouldn’t have the success it has had. Software is not magic, and getting it right takes time and a lot of hard work. Tact.ai is proud to continue advancing the capabilities of the first enterprise commercial voice assistant and work with pharmaceutical leaders to reimagine the field force experience.

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