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I need a deep dive into Evernote Business product
Thank you for reaching out to Wonder for a deep dive on Evernote Business. In my research, I found that Evernote Business is designed for small to medium sized businesses or smaller groups within a larger organization, and costs 12 USD per month per user, up to 25 users. Over 20,000 businesses use the product. Companies are generally encouraged to incorporate Evernote Business after using the individual version of Evernote. Evernote sees its Business program working less for collaboration, and instead allowing integration with other, more collaborative services.
METHODOLOGY
Most of the information included was found through the Evernote Business site. Outside sources were sought from well known and established magazines and websites. As for the future of Evernote and Evernote Business, interviews with high ranking officials were used to provide that information. Because Evernote is notoriously private about a lot of their customized clients, getting information that wasn't sourced by Evernote directly was very difficult and I stuck with what seemed like reliable case studies provided by them on their clients.
WHAT IS EVERNOTE BUSINESS?
Evernote is known as a note-taking app which includes to-do lists, spreadsheets, presentations, and more. The Business product maintains the usual Evernote features but adds on a collaboration aspect along with administrator controls. "Notebooks" are essentially folders for notes and documents; Private Notebooks are inaccessible for anyone other than the user who created them, whereas Business Notebooks can be accessed and edited by others on the same Business account. All Business Notebooks can be viewed in a library and accessed from the app. Outside documents must be attached to a note to be shared with Evernote Business, and they are then fully searchable and editable. However, only one user can edit a note at a time and editing on a document must take place outside of the app through Google Drive or a desktop based application. Through Evernote Business, one can connect their Evernote account with Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, and Basecamp to facilitate collaboration and take advantage of different features. Notes can be accessed through both the desktop app and the Evernote apps for mobile devices, even when offline. There is a built-in work chat that allows direct communication between users and sharing of individual notes and notebooks.
Evernote Business costs 12 USD per month per user up to 25 users. If more users are required, Evernote Sales can provide a custom plan. To date, Evernote has not released information about these custom plans and information about their cost is not available online.
COMPANY USAGE
According to statements released by Evernote, over 20,000 businesses use Evernote Business. It is designed for small and medium sized businesses or small teams within a larger corporation to "take advantage of their internal knowledge base by giving them the tools they need to collect, discover, collaborate, search for, and share ideas within their organization for a more productive environment."
CUSTOMER CASE STUDIES
The common link for why companies choose to use Evernote Business is that either the company or at least an administrator was already using a form of Evernote for their personal work before electing to add on the collaborative, business aspect. Evernote itself has conducted several case studies on companies with successful utilization, which I explore here.
MAILCHIMP: As an email marketing company, over eight million people use this service to send approximately 600 million emails per day. The UX team found themselves working so fast to keep up with their large number of customers, that sometimes important information was left cataloged in an inbox or passed over.
Allison Urban, a web analyst for MailChimp, was impressed by how a simple note can instantly become an actionable item for others. She made a note in Evernote Business to take a more detailed look later at a drop in email campaign sends. This note alerted the Director of the UX Team, Aarron Walter, to the statistics and he was immediately able to start working on a solution.
Because the team is able to instantly connect the dots and start working on possible answers, meetings and long email exchanges have decreased significantly, and the UX team's "time-to-action on user feedback has been cut in half."
FREITAG: This is a Swiss company that transforms recycled materials into accessories and bags, and their design team has to keep up with engineering processes, the latest fashion trends, and design innovations. To do this, they relied frequently on whiteboards and Post-It notes. Daniel Freitag, a co-founder of the company, was already a long-time user of Evernote, and decided Evernote Business was the fastest and easiest way to share information.
Shared Evernote notebooks allow everyone involved to keep up to date and stay informed of a project's progress. Importantly, it allows the team to keep tabs on ideas that have not yet come to fruition or that have not been implemented yet. Completed projects are easily cataloged and serve as reference material, which, combined with the scrapped ideas, can spark new possibilities.
GUAYAKI: A California based company which produces and distributes fair-trade yerba mate, Guayakí's sales leader Mateo Sluder uses Evernote Business to train new Cebadors. Cebadors are those who travel and share the company's yerba mate.
Evernote Business provides a new hire historical data and previous account interactions, and the Cebadors are able to upload their reports on the go, which adds transparency to the process.
Sluder used to spend half of a year travelling to train new Cebadors, but now he says that it takes less than a month for the training to become an autonomous account manager. “Ultimately, our training process is much faster and more thorough with Evernote, saving me six weeks in travel time every year. It’s indispensable," he says.
FUTURE GROWTH
In 2015, Evernote CFO Jeff Shotts explained that Evernote Business was a relatively small part of the Evernote name, but they hoped to explore it more in the future through selling directly to businesses. However, focus was predominantly placed on adding additional tiers to their paid subscription plans for individual users.
A little over half a year later, new CEO Chris O'Neill stated that collaboration - the foundation of Evernote Business - was not to be their main focus: "It’s important to not try to be all things to all people. You have Slack, you have Hipchat. That’s a well-served market. Let’s just politely say, collaboration and chat is well served. So I don’t see it as, we need to try to do everything. If we do well with frictionless capture of ideas, and world-class search and retrieval, I think we can partner with a lot of other players. Collaboration is a fact, but it doesn’t necessarily mean we have to carry all the water. I’d just as soon do some integrations and partnerships to fill out that part of it." O'Neill plans to take Evernote closer back to "basics," the place where ideas are stored to be worked on later.
O'Neill also stated that he sees the future of Evernote as a whole reaching a more balanced point between subscriptions from individual users and subscriptions from Evernote Business.
CONCLUSION
Evernote Business is aimed at small companies or smaller groups within larger companies. Its cost is $12 USD per month for each user, with 25 users allowed without a specialized sales plan. Companies such as MailChimp, FREITAG, and Guayakí find time to train and create actionable items has decreased significantly since implementing Evernote Business. In the future, Evernote hopes that there will be a balance between subscriptions between individual users and Business users.
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