pantalonesgigantesca

Aid. 100%. No replacement goals.

There's a good parallel between this question and the other one here about AI replacing programmers. What we consistently hear is that when businesses begin using our services (our own receptionist team, assisted by our AI, our website AI + Human chat, and our cloud phone system), it frees up their in-house team (office/adminstrative assistants, paralegals, etc.) to focus on work closer to the guts of the business. Essentially, by the time a caller or website visitor gets to you, they are already qualified, booked, paid, and "taken in" (having completed the intake forms). So your job is no longer to answer the phone every time it rings and hang up on Yelp salespeople, it's to continue doing your best work for new and existing customers.

(Also, we are hiring, so if you know any amazing receptionists who want to work from home, please send them our way.)

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Edit: more words

/u/JohnCarreyrou 's amazing book, Bad Blood, covers the first half of this answer better than any I can give (and I'm honored to be in it!). What happened is still a mystery today when you drill into the "why" part. I might think about this more and answer as we go. I realized it was time to bail after I'd been repeatedly lied to, after people I trusted were fired and disparaged publicly ("not a team player" etc.), and after the scientists I was working with told me that information being shared was different than what had actually happened. Even today, even after contributing my story to John in the book, I am still kind of paranoid about writing this as I think I've received three different threats from their lawyers over the years.

That's funny. I'm the cofounder of the company and none of this is prepared. Twice I've already been asked to correct my replies by others in the company. It's unfortunate that you perceive honest responses as prepared PR but as a fellow redditor I understand the skepticism. Of course, I can answer any questions you have about Rampart too.

The honest truth is that things are going well and we were invited to give an AMA since many of our clients are active in r/law and r/lawschool. But if this was prepared I probably wouldn't be talking about crappy clients in my answers. So, what would you like to see me doing differently here, what questions of yours are not getting answered well enough? I don't see any. Honestly, I'd like your constructive feedback.

Oh, Theranos was a massive exercise in "wildly inappropriate". Not the Uber kind of "wildly inappropriate" but a special flavor of it involving human blood.

The threats were C&Ds regarding my linkedin profile, my portfolio, and a talk I had once done where I mentioned I worked for a UI on a "healthcare vampire robot" or something like that. Seriously like only 2 seconds of attention given to them in a talk about User Experience Design and they probably spent $10K on lawyers to intimidate me. I even had to contact the host of the talk to have them edit that segment out of the published video.

Thanks for translating.

No. Absolutely not. We see the following:

- Solo proprietorships and boutique firms who previously answered calls or chats themselves (read: let calls go to voicemail and never answer chats) are now using our services. As we employ actual receptionists, this is an addition to the job pool, not a subtraction

- Businesses who previously had an office manager, customer service lead, or other skilled worker answering calls & chats are now freeing that person up to focus on different tasks, using our team to qualify customers. Nobody has lost a job on their side. On our side, we have to hire more receptionists to keep up with demand

Successful businesses with in-house full-time receptionists find those receptionists greeting and managing people in the office as a core part of their job duties. Those people are already new and existing customers. By setting foot in the office, they are already qualified (high intention). We're adding people to the job pool by creating an additional layer of skill for the incoming communication stage.

Our charter since day 1 has been Real Receptionists + Machine Intelligence. The first part of that requires the humans, which in this case are amazing receptionists, real people, nobody being replaced.