Customer Success Story: Vanta + Decagon

Vanta is the leading automated trust management platform that helps companies achieve compliance with over 20 security and data privacy frameworks including SOC 2, HIPAA, and ISO 27001. Vanta provides automated tests, workflows and controls to ensure a company's compliance with their standards, allowing auditors to quickly complete audits and helping companies easily stay compliant. A 2021 survey from The Harris Poll found that nearly two-thirds (63%) of organizations see compliance issues as critical barriers to growth, making the services that Vanta offers crucial to growing businesses.

As the market leader in the compliance technology space, Vanta has a large number of customers that span a wide range of industries and sizes, all with different situations and needs. As of late 2022, the total number of customers totaled over 6000, many of whom arrived at Vanta on their own.

The combination of having a complex product and lots of diverse inbound customers led to a problem commonly faced by customer support teams: not enough manpower to answer everyone's questions. Vanta's PreSales team was spending a lot of time answering similar questions over and over again. To add on, compliance is a complex and tricky subject that is not the core competency of the vast majority of companies, so detailed and difficult questions arose frequently. This was both expensive, and a poor customer experience, as customers had to wait for answers to questions that were blocking their onboarding or audit experience. Because of the complex nature of the space, agents would often need time to fully research the question and construct a detailed response.

The same problem was also faced by Vanta's support team, at an even larger scale. Existing customers would often have questions about their compliance journey, and would need quick answers to blocking questions as they sought to complete various compliance certifications and other security tasks. It simply wasn't a great user experience to surface some static help center articles for the user to sift through or have them wait for a human each time.

The end result was missed revenue as frustrated prospects left the app without getting their questions answered, and missed opportunities to delight existing customers with instant helpful answers. To help, Vanta decided to look for an AI solution to quickly scale their support and presale operations without aggressively scaling headcount.

Decagon's offering leveraged the latest advances in generative AI to automatically respond to customers whenever they have a question. This approach is fundamentally different from traditional chatbots, which are limited to a set of pre-defined responses and decision trees. Decagon's AI understands the customer's question and respond with a personalized answer, just like a human would.

By learning from Vanta's existing help center and historical tickets, Decagon was able to quickly learn the intricacies of compliance requirements and Vanta's product. Both prospective and existing customers were able to enjoy detailed and highly personalized responses within seconds. Moreover, Decagon integrated directly into Vanta's existing platforms (Slack and Zendesk) so that whenever needed, a customer conversation could be escalated to a human agent in real-time. The customer experience remained seamless, and agents were able to stay in the same workspaces they were already using. In many cases, the answer to a ticket was hidden somewhere through the large and detailed knowledge base, sometimes across multiple places, and the AI job is to find all the relevant information and construct a personalized response. This is a task that would be quite difficult for a human to do (much less in a matter of seconds), but is a perfect fit for Decagon's AI.

As conversations began rolling in, Decagon's comprehensive admin portal became a vital control center, and a way to learn about customer needs. The team was able to quickly understand why their customers were reaching out to support and how this trended over time. This enabled the team to quickly identify gaps in the help center and prioritize new content creation. Decagon also monitored agent interactions to suggest new knowledge articles that could be created to automatically improve the AI.

With their customized generative AI solution, Vanta can provide prospective and existing customers with high quality, instant, responses to their pressing questions. The AI model has become a dynamic source of knowledge available for all customers as they navigate Vanta's product and their own compliance journey.

All throughout the process, the Decagon team remained extremely vigilant in supporting the Vanta team in integrations and deployments, instantly responding to any questions or feature requests that arose. The Decagon team also worked closely with the Vanta team to ensure that the AI was learning from the right sources and was capturing the correct metadata.

Interestingly, Vanta's own team began using Decagon as a shortcut for themselves to obtain instant answers to their prospect's questions, unlocking an entirely new and unexpected source of efficiency. Decagon is now a key part of Vanta's sales and support processes, driving efficiency, freeing up the team, and helping to deliver a more delightful customer experience.