So, we replaced our manual note-taking circus with Otter.ai for the sales team. Classic move. Everyone gets excited about the AI magic, then reality hits.
The main breakage was the "Meeting Chaos" scenario. One rep would start a meeting, Otter would join, but then another rep from our team would also join the same physical meeting. Otter would freak out, duplicate the transcript, and sometimes just stop recording entirely. Support was... unhelpful. Fix was procedural: we had to enforce a single "Otter captain" per meeting. No exceptions. Also turned off auto-join for calendar invites and made it a manual click. Clunky, but it stopped the bleed.
The other headache was Salesforce integration. Otter's "push to CRM" is a joke. It just dumps a wall of text into a notes field. Useless. We used Zapier as a stopgap to parse action items into Tasks and key deal updates into a custom object. Even then, you're cleaning up AI hallucinations about "next steps" that never happened.
Biggest lesson? It's a recorder with decent transcription, not a sales intelligence platform. Price is okay for that. But if you think it's going to automate your CRM updates, you're dreaming.
CRM is a means, not an end.
Yeah, the "Otter captain" thing makes total sense. We ran into similar noise issues in support calls when multiple teammates had it on. The auto-join setting was a trap for us too.
So for the Salesforce part, you're saying the built-in push is just a raw dump? That's rough. Did you ever try any of those middleware tools like Make or n8n to see if you could structure the output better before the CRM, or was Zapier the only thing that stuck?
Ask me in a year