Rev Q&A: COVID Steps and Revver Updates (March 2020) (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Hey y'all, welcome to everybody's Revver Q&A live stream. Appreciate everyone's patience as we got this started up today. I'm Ry Schuller, your community manager. Some of you may know me better as RyRev on the forums. Today's stream, we're gonna start by discussing coronavirus and what we're doing best to support our community of Revvers and Rev staff. Then we'll chat a bit about where we're currently here at Rev as of March, 2020 and where we're going. After that, we'll get into your questions that were submitted through the question link you may have seen on the forums in an email or in the notification bell that you guys see on find work. Jason, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and get us started up.

[00:00:36] Speaker 2: Hey, thanks a lot, Ryan, and apologies, folks, for the delay in kicking this off. We're learning how to use audio, video, and blend a bunch of streams. This announcement comes at an unusual time. We're working really hard to make a bunch of improvements to the Revver experience, which you guys know most of what's going on. I'm happy to talk more about those things and tell you a few things that you guys might not know yet. I have a whole set of content planned, but I had to put it on the back burner over the last 10 days because the coronavirus has really disrupted a lot of people's work, and that's become everyone's top concern quite naturally. Let's talk about that first. The first thing I wanna say on behalf of everybody at Rev, we hope everyone is doing okay, and what we understand is a super difficult time. Everyone's been affected differently, but my sense is that a lot of people are dealing with losing jobs. I'm sure that some of you guys have multiple jobs, and some of those may not. Your companies are closing down, and that creates a lot of uncertainty, and that can be a little scary. There's a lot of inconvenience. I know a lot of people now have their kids at home, which can be more than a little bit chaotic and distracting and make it hard to get work done, and there's just a lot of uncertainty right now. And it's our hope that we want to continue to be a great place for you guys to work from home, so I'm gonna talk about what's Rev up to, how are we doing, and what does that mean for you guys, particularly during this time of the coronavirus. So first things first, our business is all about remote work. So the customers who use us use a website. Revvers who work, work from home. Our employees mostly work from an office, but we have, since inception, we have had a lot of people work from home on a regular basis, and so as a company, we are very set up for remote work. Right now we're using this technology called Zoom for video conference, and everybody at Rev uses Zoom every single day. So compared to most companies, we're a lot better off because for us, moving from working at home, working at the office to working from home, not a huge deal. So in most ways, it's business as usual. So last month, we had a lot of our employees working, for example, on new features for Revvers, new features for customers, that work continues the same way it did a month ago. The most important thing I can say is that Rev is open for business. That's not gonna change. A lot of businesses have to close right now. Our business is not gonna have to. I mean, come hell or high water, our website stays open, it's a website. There's no reason why a website would be closed in this sort of time, and as you guys know, the work that you get all comes from customers. We don't invent the work, customers have needs, and there will definitely be some Rev customers that have less work or no work. Others will have the same, others will have more. We do a lot of work for companies in the media, as you guys know, and the media is as busy as ever. There are some customers that have projects that are postponing projects because it's a crazy time right now. There are other customers, like for example, universities, that are calling right now and saying, hey, they have more needs than they did last week because they're now trying to teach classes to kids remotely, and so there's gonna be customers where spend grows, customers where spend declines. We have to be realistic in that if the economy goes into recession, which now everybody says is likely, you gotta expect that there'll be less volume than there would have been were there not a recession. That said, Rev has grown a ton every year, every year since our founding, and we also, I think, we piggyback on some major trends in our society. A lot of the business and growth that we see is related to video, whether it's online video like YouTube or the use of video in a corporate setting, like for training, and I'm reasonably confident that no matter what happens, there's gonna be more video, not less, over the next five years, so I think that we'll probably be less affected than most businesses, although there will definitely be an effect, and as much as I'd love to tell you that I know exactly what's gonna happen, nobody knows exactly what's gonna happen, I can simply say that we are doing our best to serve customers and Revvers in these unusual times. On the customer side, I mentioned how we have some customers today that have more needs than before, like those in education, for example, or folks that run, we have customers that run a lot of conferences, and now they're saying they wanna do virtual conferences, and those virtual conferences, many of them wanna transcribe, so we are looking for areas of growth and opportunity because we wanna continue to serve more customers and bring more work so that you guys have more jobs to choose from. You guys saw that, I think we posted a link that we closed our offices, I happen to be sitting in them right now, but there's only two people here. We closed our offices, like many companies did, and told people to start working from home about two weeks ago, and we'll continue to work from home for the time being, but as I said, we'll continue to work more or less as usual, we're just doing a lot more video conferences than we usually do. Now let me get to what I think is more important, which is how is corona gonna affect you guys as Revvers? What can Rev do to continue to be a good source of work? We wanna be steady for you, we wanna be there as a place that you can work, even in these crazy times, and we've been chatting with a lot of Revvers about what are your concerns today, which, like I said, are different than what they were three weeks ago, and have a couple decisions that we've made to announce over the next five minutes on what we're gonna do to be a better place for you to work during these times. So first concern we hear is Revvers are worried, will there be too many new Revvers joining Rev, and if there's too many new Revvers join, there won't be enough work for me. Well, at the moment, and for the time being, the application to join, say as a transcriptionist, is closed, we're not letting in anybody at the moment. You guys are right in that, given all that's happened with corona, interest in working from home is soaring. Somebody told me that in the week before we closed the application, the number of applications was double what we normally get, and that interest in working from home is gonna keep growing. Now, when we decide how many Revvers to let in in a given week or month, we do a balancing act with two considerations. We have to first consider how much customer demand do we see, because if we don't have enough Revvers active, we can't serve their needs, and if we can't serve them, we lose business. On the other side, if we have too many Revvers, there's not enough work to go around, and then folks aren't able to earn the amount of money they wanted to earn in that period. So it is, our philosophy is we wanna have the minimum number of Revvers that allows us to meet customer needs. That's been our philosophy since the beginning, and it will remain our philosophy. In these kind of funky times, we'll probably err more on the side of limiting the influx of new Revvers for a couple reasons, one of which is that we think there's a good chance that the Revvers that are working will probably, in some cases, work more because other jobs, in some cases, might have dried up. So we're going to continue to limit the inflow of new Revvers, because we wanna make sure that there's enough work to go around. That's the first piece of news. The second one is that Revvers are telling us that it's hard to get work done, because for some of you, kids are home from school or preschool, in other cases. Your significant other might be around the house, or your roommates, and it can be hard to work when a bunch of people are around you, and you're not used to that. That's, I think, difficult for a lot of people right now. And we've thought about what can we do with our marketplace to be more relevant now. And we know that a lot of you guys like short jobs, because short jobs are easier to fit into an hour here or there. We know that if you're not sure what's gonna happen in the afternoon, you don't wanna commit to a long job. Short jobs gives you flexibility. We are about to put in place a setting in our marketplace that is going to split more of the long audio files. So we're going to increase the number of short jobs by 25%, and we hope that's helpful. And we'll monitor how that goes over with Revvers. We'll make sure customers are okay with it. And we might take that up or down, depending on the feedback we get from customers and Revvers, but we're gonna increase the number of short jobs. And the third thing, and I think it's most important, is what about Revver Pluses? I've often said to this group that we want Revver Pluses to feel recognized for the excellent work that they do, and we want to continue to make Revver better for Revver Pluses over time. That doesn't mean there'll be a change every day, week, month, or quarter, but it does mean that each year, I would hope that there will be additional benefits for Revver Pluses that make you guys feel the investment and time you made in Rev was worthwhile, and we want you to feel, like I said, recognized for your work. We want you guys to have stability in the amount of work you do, and to feel like your position at Rev is more or less secure. As you guys know, we introduced a couple of changes a few months ago, like tenure-based grading and other things for Revver Pluses. We also, obviously, have raised the pay for Revver Pluses and TC, but today there's another one related to the coronavirus. The key concern that we've heard from Revver Pluses is what happens if the economy slows down and volumes from customers decline for some period of time? Are people gonna lose their Revver Plus status? And we don't want you to lose your Revver Plus status because of an economic issue that's not anything to do with you, so the decision we've made is that we are going to waive the volume requirements for Revver Plus until at least the end of April, and possibly beyond that, depending on how things play out. What does that mean? If you're a Revver Plus now, that means that you have been meeting our volume threshold, which is to do 800 minutes of transcription in the last 120 days. We're gonna ignore that 800, 120 days requirement, like I said, through the end of April, so if you're Revver Plus now, you still have to continue to do quality work, but the volume requirement is out the window for the time being. Now, for somebody that's on the verge of getting into Revver Plus, you still have to make that 800-minute threshold to break into it, but for those that are in it right now, you don't have to worry about your volume criteria over the next month and a half at least. So that's the change we're gonna make. We hope it's helpful. We'll look forward to getting your feedback on that. Please feel free to tell us what you think, either in the forum or you can email me, jasonatrev.com, and we wanna make sure that we're being flexible and adapting our marketplace to the needs of the community during these kind of weird times. That's the end of what we had to say for now regarding the coronavirus. Obviously, things are changing day to day. There'll probably be more changes and more things for us to announce in the coming weeks. We'll let you know if anything changes. If we can think of more ways to be helpful, we will, and we're always looking for ideas of how to be better, so please feel free to let us know. Now I'm gonna get to some of the updates that I would've done in the absence of coronavirus, and I'm gonna build on the conversation or talk we had with you guys in November, and that was the first time we had ever spoken live to the Rev community, and I said a bunch of things that we were gonna try to do differently, and I'm gonna address some of those things we said and where we are today. The most important promises we made last time is that we would be working to listen and communicate better than before. I think that the community sentiment had got to a place, an ugly place that I wasn't happy with, and I think it's because we failed to listen and communicate as much as we should. We tried to do a 180 turn on both listening and communication in the last few months, and I think we're doing better at those things. I'll talk about why and how, and we're gonna keep doing more. On the listening side, we obviously have Rye, who I joke rules the forum with an iron fist. Rye is really trying to foster great discussion, and Rye is talking with folks all over Rev HQ each week about what he's hearing in the forum, and so I think we have our finger on the pulse way better than we ever have in our history. We're also, Rye's set up a Revver council, so we have small groups of Revvers that are giving us feedback on things we're thinking about. That's been very helpful. We're doing more focus groups. We're doing more surveys. We're trying to listen in everywhere we can. Some of you guys say, well, you like one method of listening versus the other. We wanna listen across many channels, get as much input as possible so we're informed. I think we're doing that, and we'll be doing more in the months to come. On communication, we certainly are doing this, there's this live video format, which we intend to keep doing four times a year if you guys continue to find it valuable. We're also communicating more via the forum. We have several of our product managers that are more active in the forum than they used to be. For example, Robin's a PM who works on the Revver tools, including Line, and she's engaging in the forum very often talking about recent features. Many of you guys saw that another of our product managers, Nahala, posted a video in the forum about upcoming changes to improve our quality of life for Revvers. We're gonna keep doing that so long as you guys find it helpful, so please give us feedback. But you should expect to keep hearing from us, and we wanna talk often about those kind of things that we're doing for all of you. Listening, communicating, that's, I think, part of the DNA of the new Rev. We hope you like it, we're gonna keep it up, and we'll see how it goes. Second, I made a series of commitments to deliver a few features that would benefit Revver Plus, and we modified the details as we implemented them, but the spirit is more or less intact. The first one was we wanted Revver Plus, who have been with us for more than a year, to benefit from that longer tenure and to not feel like they could lose status in a heartbeat, so we rolled out tenure-based grading, which means that Revvers have been here more than a year. We'll look at 60 grades instead of 30, which we hope will give you guys some stability, and we've gotten some good feedback on that. If there's things you think we should do to tweak it, email me, let me know. None of these features are final. Every feature's a work in progress. We can definitely tweak things if we miss something, but the early feedback we've gotten on that one has been pretty positive. Secondly, we've given you guys a Need More Time button, which I think we've made available to all Revvers, and I've seen some confusions about the interface, so we may have, I think we have some polishing to do on that feature. Again, please keep sending us any feedback on it, but again, I'm pretty sure it works, and early feedback I've seen has been mostly positive, although there are some interface issues that we should maybe clean up. Third, now if you're a Revver Plus in TC, you can reapply to captions, or if you're a Caption Revver Plus, you can reapply to transcription as many times as you want, because we want to make it easier for Revvers to work across service lines. Ultimately, we want to be a great place to work online, and we want to help you guys have as many kinds of work as possible. There might be, back to corona, we might find that there's more captions than transcription or vice versa, and so, for those of you who want to work on both service lines, that will give you, I think, a little bit more stability if you could do both kinds of work, because some might grow more than others in the coming months. Those are some changes that we made, and there were a few other things that I said we would work on, some of which I think we did well. There's one area where I think we've dropped the ball a little bit. The one area that I said we would fix last time that I don't think is fixed is we talked about the ask an expert feature, where Revvers who ask questions during the job, we're not getting a response. I believe we're better now than we used to be. We're more responsive, but it's not nearly as good as it needs to be. We have assigned some people to work on that, and we tried to fix the problem. What I think, the more we dug into it, the more we concluded that we think the root cause of that problem is not so much the way we answer questions or the number of people answering questions, but we think there's just too much confusion because we haven't done a good job of educating or communicating to Revvers our standards, be they style guide standards or questions about our tools. We're gonna keep making changes to be more responsive to Revver questions, and we have just hired someone who's going to be making videos for all of you, videos for Revvers that will address your most common questions. Some of those questions will be how to use our tools better, to type faster. For example, videos on how to use text expanders to improve your productivity so you can earn more money. And we'll also be making videos to clarify the most common style guide questions because as we looked at the questions coming through ask an expert, so many of the questions are these detailed style guide questions that we felt would be best handled by, like I said, trying to explain our style guide more clearly. I think we've done not as good of a job there as perhaps we should. So beyond that, you've heard from, say, Nihala and other of our product managers, what are some of the quality of life features that we've recently done. I'm just gonna quickly rattle off the list to remind those of you guys that haven't seen it. And then I will dive into the questions with some help from Michelle Ran, who's our product leader, responsible for all things Revver related. So here's some of the features that Rev engineers and product people are working on as we speak. Explicit content. We know it sucks that sometimes you claim a job and you don't know what's in it. We are, in the short run, we're gonna give Revvers the ability to flag content as explicit, which means some human being will still see it and be surprised, but flag it so others won't be surprised. We think that's a good first step. In the medium term, we intend to use machine learning to automatically detect when files are likely to have explicit content. And so we're gonna work over time to give you guys better heads up on what you're claiming before you do it. We know people don't wanna be surprised. Some people work with children nearby, and we aim to get rid of those kinds of surprises. Second, on finding work, we're gonna add a secondary sort functionality so you can sort by two criteria. Third, we're gonna give you the ability to download work verification so you can show somebody how much you're earning if, for example, you're applying to rent an apartment or a home or something. And another one, we're improving the confidentiality agreement where we know you have to type in this phrase that's really, really clunky and cumbersome, and we're gonna do something that's less painful than that. And in captions, we're gonna make it so that you don't have to up-carrot each caption group separately. Those are things that are currently under development. There's a lot more things coming. I don't have to go through them all now, but what I'll say is a big picture change before we get into questions, and now's probably a good time. If you want, Austin, you can go and pull up the list of questions from Slido. In November, part of what I think caused the community rift where the community felt that we weren't listening is that we had spent the previous 18 months devoting most of our product and engineering people to take our artificial intelligence, which transcribes audio text, put it into the editor, and basically create a new editor that was based on editing. And that was so much work that it meant we couldn't do other stuff. So during that period, Revers had a lot of understandable concerns, issues, bugs that they reported, and many of them we simply didn't act on because all of our people were working online. And fortunately, we got to a good place last fall with a line tool where there's still more work to be done. As you guys know, it's still not available on longer jobs, and we're gonna be fixing that, we expect, by the end of the summer. But we now have all of our Rever engineering teams focused on what we call Rev quality of life issues. So the mandate I've given to these teams led by Michelle is to spend time with as many Revers as possible and ask Revers like you that I'm talking to, what's annoying? What drives you crazy? What are things that you wish were different? And you guys have been flooding us with ideas. We have long, long lists. And then the challenge for the product managers is they have to do two things. They have to first prioritize in terms of what are the most common requests we get from Revers, and then we look at which problems do we think we can fix quickly. We talk about what are the quick wins. Some of your biggest problems are easy to fix, some of your biggest problems are very hard to fix. So we typically, one thing that I've noticed, a common pattern, is sometimes Revers will be puzzled. Hey, we told you that our top three issues are A, B, and C, and you're working on these other issues. And the reason is we wanna give you guys improvements to your experience like next week, not next year. And our product managers, they have to do the work to figure out what's feasible, what can be done quickly and easily. Sometimes those things are your top issue. Sometimes they might be your issue number 11. So we're always doing a balancing act between what issues have we heard from the most Revers versus which problems do we think we can fix really quickly. Now, before we pull up this list here, I just wanna point out that you guys are teaching us how to build the platform so that we ultimately do create what we hope will be the best ever platform for remote work. And I'm very grateful for everybody that went in and submitted a question in Slido. We got hundreds of questions. My assistant Megan and I read every question that was submitted. We approved over 100. We tried to get as many questions as we could. We tried to get tons of votes. We wanted to get a list of questions that would allow us to address the community's most common concerns. And this list of questions could keep us busy for a year or more. We're not gonna be able to fix all of these things between now and next quarter. But the fact that we know what people care about, for example, the fact that we know the crew chatter is so important means we will definitely work on ways to tackle this problem and I'm very grateful for everyone who took the time to not just give us questions, but to vote on the questions because this prioritized list is going to play a very large role in allocating how we work in the weeks and months to come. So with that, I'm gonna go ahead and pull up the list of questions here on my side and we're gonna go through one by one and I will answer some and Michelle will answer some. Michelle, why don't you go ahead and tackle the first question about crew chatter?

[00:26:39] Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks, Jason. Hey everyone, I'm Michelle. Some of you may have seen me before as just Michelle on the forums, but really happy to be here today and answer some of your questions. So crew chatter, I guess no surprise that this was voted as the top question. We know, we get it. It's a huge concern for you all as Revvers. It's something that makes your lives really painful. It could be like a crystal clear file otherwise and there's all this crew chatter in the background. I think that extends to other types of content that are questionable as in, should I transcribe them or not? Like someone interrupting in the background or when there's a meeting and people just erupt into kind of like crosstalk, talking over each other. So it is something that we are really aware of, we're thinking of as a team, but it's not an easy problem to solve. When thinking of just how to tackle it, I think we wanna think about several perspectives. One is just kind of whatever guidance or rules we give to you guys as Revvers through our style guide, which is how new Revvers learn and what ultimately metrics are based on. We want it to be clear enough so that you guys are able to apply your judgment in situations if you're thinking, is this actually crew chatter or not? But also, and not cause sort of like more confusion where we're just pushing the problem around where now it becomes, oh, well, is this crew chatter? Sometimes it may be very clear. It's in the background and you don't need it. Sometimes the crew may be interacting directly with the person who is speaking, telling them like, hey, can we do that take again? And that's actually important content that a customer does wanna transcribe. And so we need to kind of think about how do we make that clear? How do we clarify with graders as well? Cause whatever standards we have, we wanna make sure that you guys are being graded on it consistently. And we also have to think about what do customers actually want to transcribe, right? As I mentioned, it's not so black and white. So we are thinking about this. We're trying to draft like different possible policies for how you know when someone should be transcribed or not, if it's crew or background chatter, et cetera, or if it's kind of like important content. I think it'll be a slow process for us to try to eventually roll something like this out. Like we'll wanna get feedback from graders and from all of you so that whatever changes we make here aren't confusing. I know there was a comment about making the crew label allowable. That is definitely something we're considering as well. Yeah, thanks for the question.

[00:29:33] Speaker 2: Well, thank you, Michelle. It's a thorny issue. And as Michelle says, we need to come up with policies to address it. We will try some things. And I have to always remind folks that every change we make or most changes we make, we have to think about how does it affect the river? How does it affect the customer? And we have to find something that satisfies both. I'm sure we can find a better policy for that than where we're at today. We just have to do it slowly and make sure customers are okay with it. There's at least one product thing that I think we can do that I think has no risk or very low risk and should help everybody, which would be to give the customers the ability to trim audio during checkout. So that way a customer who wants to simply shave off the first minute and last minute can do that. That'll make everyone's life better. So I'm hopeful that we'll do that too. No promises yet, but I think that that could also contribute to the answer here. Thank you for the question. The fact that it's, I wanted you guys to hear that it's a tough one. We're not gonna solve it overnight, but because it's your top issue, we're gonna keep chipping away at this and try to make it better. Style Guide is another one of these thorny, long-term issues for which there aren't easy fixes. I mentioned how we're gonna start making videos that, among other things, will clarify the edge cases. So we're gonna try to communicate better about what the rules are and we'll work on making the Style Guide more clear, less confusing. That's a tough road. People have obviously worked on it, haven't cracked the code. We'll keep working on that. And I wholeheartedly agree with the questioner sentiment here. New users should not have to rely on the forum for advice. Nobody should have to rely on the forum for advice. The forum should be a place to communicate. The idea that you have to go to the forum to get answers to questions, it's pretty crappy, and I'm sorry that that's the case. That's not what we want. It's an unfortunate reality. So we will work on the Style Guide. Next question. Michelle, do you wanna comment on rookies and early graduation?

[00:31:48] Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. So the question was early graduation from rookie is a major issue. Revvers graduate with as few as two graded jobs. Is any insight to make sure Revvers have a solid base of grades to offer them before they can graduate? Yeah, another complex topic, I think, to provide some context for those who might not be aware, when new freelancers come in, they have to meet a certain set of requirements to graduate from rookie to Revver. Sometimes for freelancers who are getting very good grades and feedback, we kind of let them graduate to Revver early because we think they're ready to kind of, rookies are very limited in the amount of work that they can take on, and we think that they are ready to take on more work and just giving them that access earlier on. Whoever asked this question, I think it is true that in some cases, people may be graduating where they've only done, say like three jobs and they only have three grades. And it's absolutely right. Like it's not good when you only have a few grades. And then of course it makes it so that if you do get a bad grade after that, the impact of that one bad grade is significantly increased rather than if you had a bunch of grades, you're like you're a Revver plus, you've been around for a while. So this is an issue that we're aware of. And then thank you for bringing it up to us. We've heard a lot more about it recently. So we will be looking into kind of like, how do we balance these two, right? Because we want rookies to get up and running and be able to have access to jobs as quickly as possible. But yeah, we don't want them to suffer penalties for having few grades. So there's policy things we are looking into here, like just grading new Revvers more period that are top of mind for us.

[00:33:57] Speaker 2: Thank you, Michelle. This is another thorny issue. As a reminder, the pay changes that we made in November as well as the pay increases that we made earlier this month, were both designed in transcription to get our Revver pluses doing more of what we call the harder jobs. And that was so that A, customers who have the hard jobs, get them done better. But also because we wanted what we call the easier jobs to be available to rookies. Because when a rookie tries to do a really complex job, it typically results in disaster. We get that, we don't want that to happen. Nobody going to a hospital wants to have a complex issue and to be dealt with by the person the first day at a medical school. And no customer with a complex audio file would want a rookie in their first day to handle it. So we made those changes to our pay formulas intended to give more easy jobs to rookies. And it's been partially successful. We definitely have more easier jobs going to rookies today a lot more than a few months ago. We have more to do. We continue to think, in the last time I spoke to you guys, I said that our rookie onboarding and retention stinks. I think that's still true. I think it stinks less than it did three months ago. But we're gonna keep working on that. We know it's a big problem slash opportunity for us. Our next question, how does Rev ensure consistency in grading? Another thorny one. I think I'll answer all the easy questions. Michelle, why don't you answer this other hard question?

[00:35:38] Speaker 3: Okay, happy to Jason, you're the CEO. So I mean, I think there's a good question and a good reason this is at the top. I know I've heard so many of your guys' feedback on the forum and then just through email about grading. We know it's not perfect. Any kind of system that relies on different people, right? You're gonna have issues with consistency of kind of like style of feedback or what the content of the feedback is. So I guess I don't have a answer as to are we gonna be able to kind of like ensure in significant meaningful improvements to consistency of grading? But we definitely hear that this is an issue. To give you guys a bit more context about what we do do, we have a team of people internally who oversees grading. And that's in terms of like selection of who can become a grader, interacting with graders and communicating style guide updates or things like that to them. And also monitoring greater quality. And that comes in the form of, if one of you submits a great dispute, we take a look at that. And sometimes the graders, right? Sometimes we agree and the grade should be changed. And that all goes into a feedback loop where we kind of keep an eye on who is grading and make sure that if people are not grading consistently, where we're giving them that feedback as well. Yeah, I think we can continue to just try to improve this. It is a really tough issue. I think there's probably things we can do like providing better training and guidance to our graders as well. So that they have the support from us to be able to feel empowered to make the right call and decision. And probably things that we could do in helping the tools and the interface that graders use to grade is, I will say not set up well today. Like there are things that we could improve on that front as well to make it so that the feedback people receive is of a slightly more like consistent and standardized format. You're not getting like occasionally one grader who leaves you one sentence of feedback and then another grader who may go into a ton of detail. And it's just two completely different styles. So those are a couple of things that are on our mind. Like Jason said, it's really tough. So we have to balance kind of like, what do we think will actually make an improvement versus what do we think might be something that will generate an improvement in the long run. But yeah, just know that we hear you and it's something that we're thinking about.

[00:38:41] Speaker 2: Thank you, Michelle. I would add that I think we now probably have too many graders versus what would be ideal. I prefer that we have fewer graders doing more grading per person. And ideally those, and the reason why is because if people work more as graders, that gives them more of an incentive to engage with us, learn all of our materials, which our materials, like I say, are kind of crappy today. We hope to start making videos, do a better job of communicating the style guide and edge cases. And anytime you have humans doing something, there's gonna be inconsistencies. Now it's our job to reduce those inconsistencies and we're gonna work on that. I think that we can do a lot more to educate graders, to do webinars with graders, to grade the graders, which we do, but we can do more of it and make it better. So we'll keep working on this. Unfortunately, we're not aware of any silver bullets to solve the problem, if anybody has any more game, because we really do wanna get better at this. All right, next question. Do you have plans to give extra benefits to experienced Revvers? Well, I talked about one earlier on this call and that we're waiving the volume requirements for Revver Plus during the coronavirus, at least for the next month and a half. And I have nothing more to announce beyond that today. And it's not that we don't have the answer and we're hiding it. It's that we plan our business, or at least our product planning happens like 90 days at a time. And so you guys know, frankly, almost as much as I do about our product priorities over the next 90 days, because Michelle and Nahal and Robin have told you guys what we're working on. So the things that we've told you about are the things that we're working on. Those are our priorities, that list of things that Nahal mentioned, other items that I've hinted at. Those are the features working on now, as I mentioned. What they all have in common is they're intended to improve Revver quality of life and to solve your common annoyances. I expect that we will do more for Revver Plus over time as we just did. Obviously, we raised pay and harder jobs for TC Revver Pluses. So I expect there'll be more stuff, but I have nothing to announce this time simply because we're focused on quality of life features that benefit all Revvers right now. That's our present focus. Next question. Will customers ever be able to tip Revvers? Never say never, but probably not. Our customers want our service to be really convenient and simple. And when we started the company, there were a lot of other companies doing the same thing, and we've won and they haven't. And the reason why, a couple reasons. One of the reasons is we made it very easy for customers to work with us. We don't ask them a lot of questions. We say, give us your audio and we'll sort it out. The customers like that. We have a lot of customers that give us 20 files at a time. And so my fear is that if they gave us 20 files at a time, and they came back the next day and they were all there, and we said, okay, now of the 20 people that did your work, which did you wanna tip? I don't think that they would enjoy that. I think that'd be kind of an overwhelming experience. And they'd probably say, I don't have time to figure out 14 tips of 20 Revvers. And so I think that would basically, we'd just be giving them a whole lot of guilt. And personally, I don't think guilt is something that customers wanna get when they come to buy a service from a vendor. So it doesn't seem to fit with me, to me, with the value proposition that we serve them. In other words, why they buy from us, they want convenience. We wanna stay convenient for them. So that's probably why we're unlikely to go throughout a tipping. Never say never, that's our current view. It could change, but we're not working on tipping now and don't have any immediate plans to. Next question. Michelle, why don't you tackle this one?

[00:42:39] Speaker 3: Yeah, is that the about requesting Revvers for jobs?

[00:42:43] Speaker 2: Yes.

[00:42:44] Speaker 3: Okay, awesome. Yeah, so the question is, has there been thought to allowing clients to request particular Revvers for their jobs? Yeah, this is something that we have heard from Revvers and from a few customers as well over the past couple of years. We have definitely thought about it. The reason why we haven't kind of jumped at the opportunity to do it, though it obviously sounds like it would be a benefit for everyone, is just the sheer number of customers and Revvers that we have kind of working at all times. It might be hard to see if you're just like one person kind of doing your work and then you see your favorite customers, they're around a lot, but we have hundreds of thousands of customers, tens of thousands of Revvers. And so if we were to launch a feature like this, we would wanna make sure from the customer side that it's meeting their expectations, which is if I were to request like a favorite Revver, I would wanna know that that person is available to do my work a lot of the time. And I'm not saying that we wouldn't do this, but it's hard to kind of just balance that just given how many people are in our marketplace, the chances that when a customer submits an order that that particular Revver is online and available to work is well under 100%. And so before doing something like that, I think we'd wanna figure out what customer expectations are. It is something that we could think about, but maybe we would have to frame it more as like, these are your preferred Revvers, but then there's no guarantee that these Revvers would work on your project because of course we wanna kind of ensure that you as Revvers have flexibility to work on whatever you want, right? So it's something we've considered, but it's not a top priority for us right now due to those reasons.

[00:44:46] Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you, Michelle. Sorry, Rod, do you wanna make a comment?

[00:44:50] Speaker 1: I was just gonna say we have about a 10 minute notice here. So as many questions as we can get to and then try to wrap it up.

[00:44:56] Speaker 2: Thanks. Agree with everything Michelle said, but I wanna build on that. We have a large marketplace where any given day, there are many, many thousands of jobs, many thousands of Revvers working. And I expect we'll do a lot of work over the next couple of years on helping Revvers to find the best job for them at that time. Today, we do very little to service the right job for you at the right time. If you're working from New Zealand and there's a customer that ordered from New Zealand and that customer lives a mile away from you, the odds that you find the job are very low, right? And so you could think about targeting jobs based upon geography, based upon the type of content, based upon which customers the Revvers worked for in the past, and we'll consider a lot of those things as Michelle said, that customers want things right away, customers order two in the morning, and will that Revver be there? Probably not, so that's a tricky issue to figure out. I think we could, if a customer who had high volume had a shortlist of say 10 or 12, 15 Revvers they liked, that might work, where somebody from the shortlist could do it if they got an early access window. So we've talked about it, I'd like to get there. But broadly, I think we're more likely to do more intelligent matching. If you're on Amazon, Amazon tells you what products you're gonna buy and their AI knows what you want because they have all this data on what people like you buy. And we have a bunch of smart engineers who could probably do machine learning to figure out what job you're gonna like next. So I expect we'll work on that in the medium term, but it's a hard problem, so I don't have any quick fixes. Okay, next question. Michelle, you wanna talk about Flash and HTML5?

[00:46:40] Speaker 3: Yep, yeah, so someone asked what our plans are for the Flash to HTML5 switchover and will there be much downtime associated with that? For those who don't know Flash, which is a pretty old technology that some websites use is going away at the end of December of this year. For us at Rev, we only have a very small number of features that are powered by Flash. One of them is the Lend an Ear feature, which I'm sure many of you use in the editors. We don't anticipate any issues with this. We have a plan to transition Lend an Ear and those other features off of Flash well before the December deadline in the coming months. And there shouldn't be any more downtime associated with it than there would be with a normal weekly update.

[00:47:30] Speaker 2: Thank you, Michelle. Next question, big thank you to Trixie for this question. I'm not sure if our teams got the idea from you or from somebody else, but the question is, would we relax the minimum requirements to Santa Plus given Corona? And the answer is yes, as I said, we're doing it. So thank you for the idea. We're doing it, great idea. And call up everybody. There's gonna be, Corona's a weird thing. Things are changing. There's gonna be other opportunities for us to be flexible and react and adapt to changes in the external environment. So if folks like Trixie or others have other ideas of what we could do to be helpful in light of Corona, please do let us know. Forum, email me, we read everything, thank you. Next question about the pay raise. The question is, captions isn't seeing any raise at all. So I understand this is a tricky one to talk about because we're a private company and we have, Michelle and I, for example, have a bunch of numbers that are private company financial metrics that we don't share with the public. But what I can tell you is we've gone over this pretty thoroughly and we increased pay in transcription and captions by the same amount. The difference is that those marketplaces operate differently and each business had different issues, different challenges, and when I say challenges, what I mean is our ability to serve customers well had different issues. On the transcription side, we focused all the pay increase on harder jobs for Revver Pluses, so the changes were more visible. In captions, we spread the change over most jobs for all Revvers, and so the changes were less visible. So the changes were the same in aggregate, in dollars, it's the same increase. It was harder to notice on captions than transcription. We'll keep an eye on this, but that's the early answer that we made the same change. It definitely gives us some pause to reflect. We understand that we've said this, and some people say we don't believe you, and we know what the facts are, but we have a perception issue. We're definitely thinking more about, we need to think about not only the reality, but also the perception. Maybe we should have made the change in a more visible way. Maybe we goofed up, I'm not sure. We're certainly learning that perception is as important as reality, and sometimes reality's not enough. So we're gonna be thinking about that going forward with future changes. But thank you for the feedback. Michelle, line editor, when's it gonna be ready? When's it gonna handle all the audio?

[00:50:16] Speaker 3: Yeah, that's something we have a team of engineers working on now. It's not an easy change, because there's some limitations with the technology we've built line on currently, so we have to move to a different technology platform, but we hope to have line available on files of all lengths by the end of summer.

[00:50:38] Speaker 2: Thank you. We've been working on our editing tools for probably eight years now. We think they're the best out there. We're gonna make them better and better. Taking a large, long video and a lot of text and doing it in a web browser is technically very hard. It makes computers really slow, and some people may have a really fast computer, some people may have a slow computer, and to make a long video and a long text work quickly on a slow computer is hard. We have the best engineers, we think, anywhere, and they're working on making this work. So fingers crossed, as soon as I say fingers crossed, we're gonna get it done, expect the end of the summer, and we think that this is going to improve productivity substantially on those longer audio files, because we know people wanna use our speech recognition. I'll tackle the last two questions myself, and then we'll wrap. C. Hawley, thank you for asking about making the entrance test harder. About two months ago, we decided to, we shifted our priorities a little bit to put reverent quality of life issues front and center. Prior to that, our top priority was we were going to overhaul the application process. Big picture, I think we can get a lot better at making sure we admit the right people. There have been times in the past where the test was too hard in the wrong ways and not hard enough in the right ways. We understand that some people have better typing speeds, some people have a better ear for transcription, some people have a better knack for the nuances of captions, and I think our applications and testing are frankly crude relative to what they ought to be, and so I expect we'll overhaul these things. I would hope we overhaul the applications in the back half of the year. That's our intention at present because we think we could be a lot better, and ultimately, bringing on more qualified new rookies will help. Everything helps customers, and it reduces the number of people that have a frustrating experience. It also makes grading a little easier if you have fewer bad mistakes. Last question I'll tackle. I've spoken, I think, a little bit about this in the past. The question from Alexander, would you consider adding a Revver++ tier of the most experienced, full-time, reliable Revvers? I definitely expect us to move in this direction over time. Today, we serve mostly small companies. We're getting more and more business from large companies who generally are willing to pay more for higher quality, and so I believe that just as folks like Alexander and Revvers want to get better work at higher pay with higher standards, customers want that, too, and so I think there's a nice opportunity there for us to deliver a higher-end service for customers and to have some sort of higher tier for Revvers. I expect we'll get there over time. You've heard what our current priorities are, so we're not working on that at the moment. That said, our sales team and product people are spending time with our largest customers and are getting input on what they would like to see from us and some of those conversations are around how we can raise our quality standards through a higher-tier service, so if I was trying to set expectations realistically, that's probably more of an early next year issue, maybe later this year. Right now, you've heard we're working on a lot of quality of life issues to help all Revvers. That's our current focus. So that is about the time we have for today. We hope you guys found this helpful. Thank you, Rye and Michelle, for getting out in front of folks. We're gonna keep doing this. I hope you guys find it valuable. Again, I'd love to see comments either in the forum or email to me. Did you find this helpful? How can we do this better in the future? We want to be responsive and adapt. As I mentioned earlier, we're trying to listen and communicate better than ever and we're gonna keep working on that. We make mistakes, we screw things up sometimes, we'll keep screwing some things up, but we're gonna try to keep listening and communicating so that when we do a screw-up, we can fix it faster than we did in the past. And please do let us know also how you're being impacted by the coronavirus and if you have more ideas for how we can respond, we'd love to hear them. Thank you, everybody, and have a great rest of your day. Take care.

[00:55:16] Speaker 1: Thank you.