“We’ve had a lot of pinch-me moments when we’re using Trint. Like, this is so much easier and so much more efficient than what we used to be doing.”
Ally Lutter, Senior Marketing Manager at the Epson Tour, sat down with us to discuss how golf and Trint go hand-in-hand, and how they are finding the most effective ways to tell the stories of their athletes.
As the Official Qualifying Tour of the LPGA, the Epson Tour is “the pathway for athletes to pursue their dreams of playing professional golf on the biggest stage”, Lutter explains. With wide global representation and a title sponsor, Seiko Epson Corporation, they are supporting athletes in any way they can, “making sure that once they get their shot at the big stage, they’re fully ready for it.”
The marketing team at the Epson Tour prioritises highlighting their athletes’ personal journeys and challenges, helping not only to promote their skills, but to keep them real, relatable, and human.
In this way, Lutter describes that the Epson Tour team is able to ask questions like “what do our players have going on? What do we know? And how can we make it a little bit relevant to what we’re doing?” Focusing on personal aspects and specific moments of their athletes’ lives helps the company to build connections and further the reach and relatability of their content.
“All of our storytelling for the Epson Tour starts with that ideation process.”
While dealing with media outlets may not be second nature to most athletes, the Epson Tour looks at ways to bolster their athletes and give them the best possible experience to get media-ready.
When it comes to supporting the athletes and their journeys, Lutter explains that “we do everything we can to help train our athletes from a media perspective. Whether it be through voice memo or on-camera interviews, having them take media opportunities every chance they get helps set them up for interviews with external media. We try to train them as much as we can so that when they graduate to the LPGA Tour, they are fully ready to take on any opportunity that comes their way.”
Before using Trint, Lutter mentions that once the team got an interview, they would “put headphones on and transcribe it by ear… all from listening and rewinding and listening and rewriting and listening and typing it out as [they] go.” Which proved to be “a little bit difficult and very much a waste of time.”
This led them to look for other options to ease the workload and make processes smoother. That’s how the Epson Tour came upon Trint. “It definitely takes a lot of time off of our plates, and we can now throw our transcripts into Trint, go in and edit what we need to, and then keep telling the story.”
When Lutter started with the Epson Tour and was transcribing by ear, the stories would take longer to tell, with the “result that we tell less stories just because it’s taking longer for each one that we’re producing.” Using Trint’s transcription features, plus the sharing and editing tools, helps the team to tell more of their stories naturally and speeds up the process, leaving more time to focus on the athletes themselves.
With the Epson Tour taking their team and athletes all across the United States, they needed something that would make their lives easier while travelling and be able to keep up with the fast-paced world they work in. When working with Trint on the go, Lutter describes that “it’s definitely a lot easier to be able to log in from anywhere in the world, put the file in Trint and then trust that 5-10 minutes later, it’s going to be fully there ready for us.” It also helps them to “walk away from the computer for a bit and start another project or get something else accomplished and then come back to it and it’s there ready.”
“Having both the desktop version and the mobile version of Trint really helps us when we’re on the go, especially for such a fast-paced environment of working in sports.”
Lutter also mentions the importance of “keeping the content very authentic”, especially in areas where having the correct information is key. The team still ensures they “fact check everything, doing [their] due diligence”, and this is where Trint’s software helps to support and save time for these crucial steps to be the focus point. The team has additional peace of mind that any audio transcribed by Epson Tour would never be used to train Trint’s AI, in line with Trint’s strict data-security policies.
“It’s important to the organization to make sure that there are specific data and policies in place, so it was great to know that Trint had our back with that.”
After getting comfortable with Trint’s transcription features and using it to improve efficiency, the team is interested in exploring further and taking advantage of the live transcription features to help further enhance their workflow.
“I would say, as we’re on the go doing more of our voice memo interviews, that live transcription service will be awesome for us.” Trint’s live feature can help support on-camera interviews and social pieces that the team wants to produce, creating a more efficient process for those shorter, snappier interviews and quick stories on the go.
From using Trint to support workflows and ensure their athletes’ stories can be told more effectively, the Epson Tour has got the foundations to take their interview transcriptions further than ever before.
“Trint is perfect for us… it’s a comfortable way of using AI and knowing that it can be trusted.”
