BlueConic Provides More Responsive RFPs
BlueConic provides a customer data platform (CDP) and customer growth engine to unify first-party data from all connected channels into persistent, real-time profiles for individual consumers.
The Boston-based company had developed a rich library of content that it used to help develop requests for proposals (RFPs) for customers, but over time the content had become outdated, duplicated, or hard to locate. As a result, the company’s solutions consultants had to start from scratch on each proposal, a time-consuming process that meant they couldn’t develop the RFPs as quickly as some competitors.
“It was a nightmare,” recalls Floran Felen, BlueConic’s senior director of presales consulting. “We wanted a more structured way to handle RFP questionnaires.”
The company wanted an artificial intelligence-based solution to help it produce the RFPs much more efficiently, which would help the company scale as well, according to Justin Walsh, a BlueConic solutions consultant.
To ensure it selected the best of a growing number of AI-based technologies, the company evaluated more than a dozen solutions, scoring each one based on satisfaction with AI-generated answers to RFP-related questions.
Responsive was the clear winner, Walsh says. “We found the Responsive results to be the closest to that of a human employee,” Walsh says. Another selling point was that Reponsive allowed BlueConic to fully test the solution to ensure it worked as desired in the company’s environment before signing an official agreement.
“We are an AI-native organization,” Felen adds. “The Responsive approach to the handling of RFPs aligns with the way that we approach tasks and processes.”
The first step with the technology was a content clean-up to ensure the knowledge base had the latest details and no duplicate content, Walsh says. “We used Responsive’s AI tool to analyze content, synthesize it, then write new content rather than using the same answers over and over again for every prospect.”
Doing so enabled BlueConic to more closely personalize responses for each inquiry and more efficiently deliver updated content to each individual, Walsh says. The underlying large language models have improved over time as well, meaning the performance of the solution continues to improve.
However, at the beginning of the initiative, BlueConic executives didn’t fully trust the AI, Walsh admits. “We would edit every single response, so at the beginning it didn’t give us the greatest time savings compared to the next quarter and the quarter after. We have found over the last year, using the trace score capability to determine how accurate the response was, we can gauge if a response needs a full review or a rewrite or if we can move on to the next question.”
As BlueConic executives became more comfortable with the AI-generated content, Responsive’s AI tool started handling more of the RFP process. Within six months, it was generating complete RFPs.
Walsh adds that there is more trust with the Responsive solution because it relies on knowledge from the BlueConic content library rather than using LLM tools pulling from a variety of public sources, some of which have questionable material. The BlueConic content is also reviewed for accuracy by the company’s legal team.
Along with removing duplicate and outdated content, Responsive AI also helped Walsh rewrite content for clarity and consistency.
The results have been impressive, with time savings for RFPs and prospect/customer questions that come before or after RFPs are requested. The average number of hours per RFP dropped 54 percent, from 13.6 to 6.2. On the receiving end, the total response time dropped 72 percent and the average time to answer prospect/customer questions decreased 61 percent.
Now that the Reponsive’s AI benefits have been proven with the use of the solution for RFPs, BlueConic plans to expand use of the technology across the organization, enabling the company to provide customized answers to specific customer questions.
“We can incorporate market events or industry news for specific customers,” Felen says. “So they get a personalized message, which aligns with our organizational goals of being AI native, fully automating, with potential human intervention in the process.”
The Payoff
Since bringing Responsive AI into its RFP processes, BlueConic has seen the following results:
- average hours per RFP dropped 54 percent, from 13.6 hours to 6.2 hours;
- total response hours dropped 72 percent; and
- average time to answer prospect/customer questions decreased 61 percent.