I’m thrilled to announce that the “ATM moment” for information security questionnaires is here.
With our new “Customer self-serve questionnaire eliminator,” we’ve sharpened the AI that powers our internal-facing questionnaire response tool, and made it safe for your customers to use.
Customers can now visit your Conveyor trust portal, upload their questions, and get immediate, accurate, AI-summarized answers.
What do I mean by “ATM moment?”
Imagine if cash withdrawals hadn’t modernized since the 1950’s. You’re heading home from work and realize you need to get cash. So you:
- Drive out of your way to your local bank branch
- Find out they’re closed, return the next day
- Wait in line to speak to a teller
- Wait as they count out the cash for you
- Drive home
As a bank customer, that would be a crappy experience. And it’s not a whole lot better for the bank, either: they have to staff desks and devote resources to rote tasks rather than valuable client work. Thankfully, we have ATMs today, available nearly everywhere 24/7, that let you self-serve what you need immediately.
Good for you, and good for the bank.
Goodbye stone ages, hello GPT for questionnaires
We all take that modern experience for granted when it comes to cash withdrawals… and yet, when it comes to information security questionnaires, we’re stuck in a bygone era.
When a customer sends you a security questionnaire questionnaire, they’re waiting in line for you to manually answer dozens, if not hundreds, of questions that you’ve answered countless times before. As the vendor, you have to staff desks and devote resources to rote tasks rather than valuable work.
Sound familiar?
Conveyor is ushering in a new era.
You can now turn on a feature in your Conveyor trust portal that lets customers upload their questionnaire questions. Conveyor then searches the customer-accessible content of your portal and uses generative AI to summarize the findings. It all happens instantly and accurately: the self-serve “ATM moment” for security reviews.
Conveyor’s accuracy - so good we made it customer-facing
To achieve this milestone, we had to take the technology that powers our internal questionnaire response tool, and make it safe for customers to use.
That meant:
- Making the experience as dead-simple as possible and
- Ensuring extremely high accuracy, with no false-positives - since we’re cutting the vendor out of the loop, after all!
How accurate is “high”?
We’ve run hundreds of trials with tens of thousands of questions on varying knowledge bases, and are now consistently seeing 94% precision.
That means when the bot finds potentially relevant content to answer a question, it will only present that content and summarize it if the confidence in the results is extremely high. In other words, you won’t find yourself backtracking or explaining funny answers, like we sometimes do with our favorite sales team answers.
How to get started
We’ve made the customer self-serve eliminator ridiculously easy for you to test, so you can get a sense of the experience before making it live to your customers.
First off, you need a knowledge base.
Getting any results from this feature will require that you have question and answer pairs that are visible to your customers (whether “Public” or for “Approved Customers.”) Navigate to your Knowledge Base to make sure you have at least 100 q&a pairs that meet that definition, although the results drastically improve once you’ve achieved ~400 customer-accessible q&a pairs.
Next, visit your Portal Designer, and expand the “Customer Facing Questionnaire Eliminator.”
Here, you can customize the disclaimer text that customers see before they upload questions. Then, click “Test this experience” to see the same flow your customers will see. The experience should be self-explanatory from there (if it isn’t, we haven’t made it simple enough, and we want to hear about it!)
Before turning it live to customers, you may want to subscribe a Slack channel to answerbot.
This will allow you to keep an eye on all the answers that your customers are getting from this experience. Assuming you have the Conveyor Slackbot installed already, just navigate to the channel of your choice in Slack, then run the command: /conveyor subscribe answerbot
As customers interact with this feature, you’ll receive notifications (batched every 5 minutes) summarizing what questions they uploaded and what answers they’re getting. You can provide feedback on the answers to improve Conveyor’s models directly via Slack.
Ready? Click & go.
Once you’re ready to turn it on for customers, just click “Enable the questionnaire eliminator in our portal” back in the Portal Designer, under the “Customer Facing Questionnaire Eliminator” accordion.
How should you leverage this feature?
You and I have been in this business long enough to know that not every customer is going to self-serve their answers, and there will definitely be customers who are well worth your time to give them the white-glove treatment.
However, there are also those customers who, for whatever reason, have questionnaire needs that you can’t satisfy on the SLA they’re looking for - perhaps they’re on a lower-tier plan, or maybe their spend is so low they fall below your threshold of “willing to do a questionnaire for them.” Previously, you had to tell those customers “Go pound sand,” “Wait a couple months and we’ll get to you eventually,” or “Root around in our trust center and try to find what you’re looking for.”
You can now offer a delightful, AI-powered alternative to those customers via your Conveyor Trust Portal. Soon, you’ll be able to grow the customers relying on this self-serve method (who wouldn’t want the answers instantly, after all?) and even raise your threshold for questionnaire completion.
Happy trust-building!