Many solutions exist on the market today for helping your teams spend less time on answering customer security questionnaires. The solutions on the market are:
- Pure software solutions that will use AI to auto-generate answers to questionnaires
- A hybrid combo of software and a third-party human team to perform QA checks of answers
- Third-party managed service provider who uses a human team take a first pass at questionnaires for you
Based on our experience we’ve found that these are the most important factors to consider when it comes to information security teams looking for a faster way to respond to security questionnaires:
1. Fast turnaround times for customers, especially when there are tight deadlines for sales teams
Relying on a service provider to respond to your questionnaires prolongs the overall process. Essentially, you have to wait for each questionnaire to be returned, even if it’s a short one.
Opting for efficient AI automation software enables you to upload your questionnaire and receive immediate answers—no waiting required.
2. Questionnaire answer accuracy
To speed up the security review process, it is essential for responses to have a high level of accuracy. Tasking an external team to fill out your questionnaires can lead to having to rewrite answers after waiting for your service provider to send it back, often leading to even more time spent on questionnaires.
Effective AI automation software can accelerate the process while maintaining a consistent accuracy rate of 80% and above.
3. Full control of the knowledge base so your team can use it too
If you go the managed service provider route, they also manage your knowledge base. This oftentimes leads to information not being updated in a timely manner, manually emailing back and forth to find the right answer within your own team, and lack of access to the knowledge base when your team has one-off questions to answer on their own.
A reliable questionnaire automation software will allow to total control over what information you put into the software and what you get out of it as well so the time you spend on maintenance results in a usable source of truth for your team.
4. Reasonable pricing for limited budgets
A fully managed questionnaire answering service — where a third-party team answers questionnaires for you — tends to come with a hefty price tag. The price becomes difficult to justify with volume and/or depending on the size of questionnaire. Sending a 20 question questionnaire over to a team to answer and waiting on someone to get that back without the flexibility to do it yourself can be challenging for teams that are scaling revenue fast.
However, opting for these services may not be necessary when a dependable do-it-yourself alternative is available. A software that offers a reliable DIY approach is not only quicker, but also more cost-effective.
We know there are a lot of tools out there. How do you know which will actually work in your workflow? Get started with a free 1-week proof of concept and test with your own data and team to see which is the best fit for you.
Conveyor’s AI Security Questionnaire Automation Software
Differentiator #1 - Conveyor’s AI Auto-Generates Precise Questionnaire Answers Instantly
Instead of waiting hours and days for answers to security questionnaires, Conveyor’s security questionnaire automation software can generate accurate answers instantly so you can get a completed questionnaire back to a customer within minutes.
With a simple upload and import step, you can get answers generated almost immediately. Conveyor supports instant imports of excel files. It also accepts word docs, PDF files and others but with a slightly longer processing time (think minutes/hours, not days). Once imported, Conveyor’s AI will generate precise answers based on source materials in your trust center — using both documents and question and answer pairs to craft an accurate answer.
Plus, Conveyor makes it possible to do a quick export to an excel to get it right back to your customers. No frills, just reliable auto-generated AI answers delivered efficiently.
Since Conveyor’s AI can cite answers from documents in your trust center, it will take it one step further and even auto-generate links to certain commonly used documents that customers can access behind an NDA gate — making it a one-click experience for customers to access supporting documentation.
What’s more is the browser extension available for portals can now auto-fill certain portal-based questionnaires like OneTrust. For other third-party portals, you can still bring the AI to wherever your questionnaires live and get auto-generated answers in seconds.
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Differentiator #2 - AI Answer Accuracy + Less Knowledge Base Maintenance
In order to keep your security review process moving fast, answer accuracy is key.
Conveyor generates 80-90% accurate answers to questionnaires by using both documents and question and answer pairs as sources to give teams more confidence in the accuracy of the answers generated. With sources cited, so you can track exactly where the AI pulled answers from.
Now that Conveyor's AI can use documents to generate answers, getting the most out of AI means you can also manage a smaller knowledge base. Based on our testing and over 300,000+ questions processed in Conveyor's security questionnaire automation software, we've found that 5-10 common documents paired with roughly 400 Knowledge Base question-and-answer pairs enable the AI to answer roughly 85-90% of the questions on typical InfoSec questionnaires.
There are also many knowledge base features to help you keep question and answer pairs up to date such as assigning owners, setting reminders to update, tagging a subject matter expert to verify an answer, and more.
Conveyor’ software also offers AI document reading from your portal and will even auto-generate links to certain commonly used documents.
Differentiator #3 - You fully control everything you put in and get out of the software
With Conveyor, you establish a shared source of truth for your teams. This means you have complete control over what information you put in and get out of the software and have access to full functionality including not only answering security questionnaires, but also using the trust center to share documents when customers request them.
When your team has access to Conveyor, It’s easy to handle one-off questions using the browser extension or Slack integration. Teams can use the browser extension to perform one-off searches of the knowledge base when needed. For example, if sales gets a prospect question in an email, they can quickly pop open the extension and find what they need. Teams can use Slack in the same way and search the knowledge base using simple Slack commands when questions arise.
Knowledge base maintenance is simple and straightforward using Conveyor. You can assign questions to subject matter experts and set verification/expiration periods. Team members can comment and ask questions of the SME's. The software also reveals valuable insights such as popularity score, times copied by your team, times viewed by a customer (if you set questions to be publicly available or gated behind an NDA in your trust center), and time between verification.
Differentiator #4 - Conveyor's do-it-yourself method using our AI is faster, and cheaper
With features like AI auto-generating precise answers to questionnaires, a browser extension to speed portal questionnaires, and even integrations to speed your sales and infosec workflows, a security questionnaire automation software like Conveyor comes in at a cheaper price point than a managed service provider.
Conveyor’s pricing model is based on number of questionnaires completed annually (with monthly pay-as-you-go options as well for lower volume). There are volume discounts on list price for anything above 5 questionnaires annually. More information on pricing is here.
SecurityPal
SecurityPal is a managed service provider for completing security questionnaires. You can pass questionnaires to their overseas team to complete with a guaranteed turnaround of a day or two with options to upgrade for faster service.
Users like the fully managed service aspect of SecurityPal’s offering, but the cost is typically higher than pure software solutions on the market so often is better suited for teams with larger budgets.
Conclusion
When it comes to effectively responding to customer security questionnaires, it's important to prioritize quick response times, accurate answers, complete control over the knowledge base, and reasonable pricing. Managed service providers are a great option when you want to completely outsource the task, but naturally, come with higher costs. Conveyor's AI Security Questionnaire Automation Software provides instant and precise answers, ensuring a high accuracy rate, grants full control over information, and offers a cost-effective, do-it-yourself approach.
We know there are a lot of tools out there for automating answers to security questionnaires— but which will work best for your team? Get started with a free 1-week proof of concept and test with your own data and team to see which is the best fit for you.