Selling a computer specially created for disabled people is a long way from hawking sneakers. But Rita Bigot (pronounced "Big-oh") sees a few parallels. A former marketer for Reebok, Rita saw the company through a huge boom during her 12 years there. Now, as customer service director for Assistive Technology, Rita sees the same rosy future for this 2-year-old maker of digital tools for the disabled. In fact, she's named their first major product - a tablet computer called the "Freestyle" - after the running shoe that drove Reebok's sales through the roof during the '80s.
The Freestyle, of course, will be a lot more rewarding to ship than new shoes. The sleek black computer, which is due out in a few weeks, is a little bigger than a notebook and a lot sturdier. Assistive Technology used frogdesign in Sunnyvale, California, to design it to look like a mainstream consumer product, rather than the "Frankenstein's monster" machines that are usually patched together for the disabled.
A spinoff from Boston Children's Hospital, Assistive Technology used the hospital as an informal testing ground for the product. The Freestyle is specially tricked out for users with visual and motor-control difficulties. It's meant to function as an overall communication device as well as a command center, allowing users to control their environments, from garage doors to light switches. While the machine has the heart of a PowerBook 5300, it also comes loaded with proprietary software. Named "Companion," the software allows individual users to customize the interface. In a classroom setting, for instance, one student might need to operate the computer through voice recognition. Another might use the touchscreen keyboard. The computer even recognizes a user's favorite words, expanding them as soon as the first few letters are typed.
The richness of Freestyle's features may be a boon to the disabled, but it spells hard work for customer-service reps. "Your tolerance level has to be different from person to person," says company president Jim Lewis. "You might get an irate parent looking for a workaround to some technical problem. You also might get a customer that can only talk on the phone through a synthetic voice. These calls are very time-consuming, and might even take all day."
If you're up to the challenge, Rita is currently looking for two customer-service reps to round out her team, including one with a more technical background. The requirements are three to five years in customer service, with a talent for phone diplomacy. She'd like to find someone with a BA or equivalent work experience. And for the technical position, she'd like to see a knowledge of Macintosh as well as Microsoft Word. It's a good starting salary, and though the company doesn't have a health plan yet, it will pay 75 percent of the cost when you carry your old plan over. But they do cover dental and have a 401(k).
Jim, who was chief information officer at the Harvard Health Plan before starting Assistive Technology, believes customer service is the second-most important part of what the company does. While the Freestyle removes barriers in people's lives, the service reps remove barriers to using the computer.
