Responsive (formerly RFPIO)

Vorteile

It's quite a luxury to be using Responsive when working with RFPs, customer/vendor questionnaires and similar documents that require gathering knowledge and answering inquiries. Most companies I know still use manual processes for the same and keep on having to redo the same work over and over again. Responsive provides an easy workflow, enterprise level access control and ability to build up a strong database of knowledge bits to semi-automate the necessary tasks and get answers to customers in a much faster way.

Nachteile

While I don't have direct experience with the ETL process that moves questions from customer systems/documents to Responsive, based on what I observe, the platform could be doing a better job of maintaining the question formats (e.g., multiple choice selections, drop-down fields, etc.)

Vorteile

I like how user-friendly it is. I'm also enjoying the new grammar check capability.

Nachteile

How difficult it is to set up saved searches.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Loopio

Warum Responsive (formerly RFPIO) gewählt wurde

I changed jobs, to be honest. I find the two applications quite similar.

Zuvor genutzte Software

Loopio

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Responsive (formerly RFPIO)

I did not make the final decision, but price did play a role, as did the fantastic responsive support staff.

Vorteile

1. the ability of AI to find response recommendations from previously answered questions
2. the ability to tag or invite someone to assist with a1. particular question
3. the notification email that there are still outstanding questions
4. the team collaboration and what their duties are

Nachteile

1. Limited view of RFP or the difficulty to reviewing the document
2. Garbage in is garbage out and if there isn't enough responses for a particular question then no data
3. Difficulty of editing, undoing to adding special type functionality
4. Requires automatic save as the solution seemed to consistently delete material and very difficult or impossible to retrieve it.
5. Difficult inserting pictures or cutting and pasting information from other sources.

Vorteile

Responsive has an easy to use and easy to learn UI, which makes it easier to onboard new members/teams to the tool. It provides us an opportunity to create and leverage an answer library and collaborate with multiple teams at the same time, helping save a lot of time. Another great aspect is the value for money that the tool provides, compared to similar tools available in the market. Lastly, the account management team is very helpful and responsive (pun intended) and it is always a pleasure to work with them.

Nachteile

The answer suggestions that the tool provides while working on a questionnaire are incorrect a lot of times because sometimes the tool does a simple keyword match and because of the nature of questions, although the keywords may match, the answers suggested do not match the question at all. During such times, we rely on the human expertise and experience to search for the correct answers in the library.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Loopio

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Responsive (formerly RFPIO)

Value for money, simpler UI, great account mgmt team,

Vorteile

Being able to track who completes each question, review, and task, and when they do it.

Nachteile

Responsive sometimes does not recognize RFP documents in the import configuration setting.

Vorteile

Responsive is one of the best RFP tool I have worked on. Any functionality from RFPIO is top notch be it a UI, export functionality, AI response. I will say RFPIO is the best tool for RFP responses.

Nachteile

Some time import of Ariba file doesnt work as it fail to take drop done. Also word template for response also some time create issues.

Vorteile

How powerful is the tool and how depth you can go on the answering library page and project

Nachteile

Licensing costs and slow response times when pasting text into search functions

Vorteile

AI enabled RFP responding platform which provides automatic prompts for each question. Collaborative platform allows entire teams to work on a single project.

Nachteile

Formatting when downloading means that images are not embedded in cells during download and extraction process.

Vorteile

Responsive makes finding content so simple. The recommended answers, along with the ability to search in many different ways (keyword, tags, facets) has made creating responses fast, and as easy as possible.

Nachteile

I wish formatting answers was a little easier.

Vorteile

I like the content library and the efficiency of managing projects.

Nachteile

The inability to distill bids within the platform.

Vorteile

The ability to upload our customer templates and answer on the fly, and then download the completed template. Very intuitive to find responses to questions in the library. Auto tagging Questions & Answers in templates.

Nachteile

There were a few bumps in the new version and a bit of a learning curve but overall a very good software for our needs.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Loopio

Warum Responsive (formerly RFPIO) gewählt wurde

The ability to integrate into Microsoft Teams, the ease of responding and importing our own templates.

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Responsive (formerly RFPIO)

Loopio wasn't ready to integrate into some of the software we use regularly.

Vorteile

The Answer Library is by far the most useful feature for our team. Automatically capturing these responses, and manually tagging them with metadata makes search and retrieval easy - and also narrows results in suggested answers significantly making it easy to find what you are looking for (as long as it was capture in a previous project).

Nachteile

We have no really managed to use this as an end-to-end solution yet. It is designed to use that way, but many of our Styles were incompatible with system fonts when we began using the product.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Loopio

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Responsive (formerly RFPIO)

The features and pricing more closely aligned with our needs.

Vorteile

That it was very easy to start working with, and that we have all the previous content in a very accesible way. The reports we receive are great, as we can have an overview of the projects and create stats on how we are working.

Nachteile

We need to work very hard to keep everything updated. We have too many products and sub-companies, and therefore it is very difficult to use the AI automatic answers. There are many applications we are not using because they are limited to the admin, so I dont think we are using the full power of the tool. But that is more on us, I guess.

Vorteile

Having a central store for questions that we've been asked in the past and what our answers for those questions are is very important. We get a lot of RFPs/RFIs and Security Questionnaires around our company and solutions and it is a crowdsourced effort across various teams within our company. Giving everyone access to these past responses and the ability to flag what they apply to and when they need to be refreshed is very key for us to response to customer requests quickly and with a high degree of accuracy and completeness.

Nachteile

We've been using the solution for awhile and we have a lot of data inside. Some needs to be reworded or updated to remain relevant. We plan on using the A.I. capabilities to help with this updating.

Vorteile

The way it makes our lives easier to handle RFP's is just amazing. Lots of options like content library, reviews, etc.

Nachteile

Everything's almost perfect I would say as I didn't find any noticeable fault.

Vorteile

RFP and workflow management becomes very easy with this tool. The content library and review cycles has helped out team a lot

Nachteile

There is no particular drawback. This tool has helped us a lot

Vorteile

Responsive has a great content library which grows over time and auto-tags relevant answers.

Nachteile

The import process for importing files into the tool should be more smooth and user friendly.

Vorteile

Ability to easily manage and see which projects teammates are working on. Ability to assign sections of proposals/RFPs to specific team members. Ability to import customer RFPs into platform and export easily.

Nachteile

Sometimes the search may not return what you may be expecting. Tags are a feature which can be used to help you categorize what you are looking for.

Vorteile

Import and export is a game changer. I like the Slack integration.

Nachteile

The UI can hide features in unusual areas.

Vorteile

knowledge base search was great and the only dificuylty was finding one among many

Nachteile

tough UI finding one among many from time to time

Vorteile

Ease of Use, continuous improvement pushed in CI/CD from the cloud.

Nachteile

a) PowerPoint better integrated in the solution to also compose slide decks presentation for RFI responses, or business development pro active proposal. It however then first need a function that can search per slide into presentations of the repository.

b) an ability to moderate the answers of completed RFP in the same sequence as they appear into the RFP... for now all the Q&A of an RFP are mixed, which makes the moderator nervous in changing its focus on a series of related Q&A instead of getting them in the logical order

Vorteile

Generally speaking, everything about this software is incredible. My absolute favorite feature of RFPIO is the Answer Library, specifically the Recommendations toolbar, and how accurate it is. I'd previously worked with Microsoft Sharepoint, which offered no such functionality, and working on proposals was way more tedious and time consuming than necessary. RFPIO fixes that.

Nachteile

Sometimes RFPIO has a hard time formatting certain files - which is understandable, seeing as different clients present different RFP formats. My two biggest issues are that certain tables, especially in Word format, have to be formatted in "Table Properties," rather than simply being able to click on a cell and making it a Question, Subquestion, etc.

Secondly, I'm often presented with situations where the client's designated answer space is in the same column as the question, just a row down. I don't believe RFPIO can recognize this yet.

Vorteile

Being able to view an Overview of a project is impactful for proposal managers, showing the completion status, flags etc.

Nachteile

For large projects, RFPIO is not ideal. Too much clicking to get to sets of questions. Not enough formatting options for ingestion, for example, we receive a lot of RFPs with varying types of checkboxes, RFPIO cannot accommodate this. Its too cumbersome for large RFPs for the proposal manager. For the responders, I believe its more helpful.

Vorteile

RFPIO is flexible and powerful and saves us time. It allows us to fully manage our library of responses, as well as attachments and projects, with easy visibility into what is going on. Even better it allows multiple divisions of our company to manage everything in one system!

Nachteile

There is nothing we don't like about RFPIO.

Vorteile

Answer library, smart file upload functionality

Nachteile

Assigning questions to different authors is not very clear cut. I find that I need to assign all questions to all team members involved on a response so that they have visibility on the entire project. Otherwise, they can only see the specific questions that are assigned to them.

Vorteile

Mainly the project management capabilities of the product. The first step of vetting an RFP always takes time, but with Responsive your hard work is rewarded with automation after you get the ball rolling.

Nachteile

Building the database wasn't as intuitive as I would have liked, though the custom fields being able to be facets alongside tags is a great feature for those who are used to a traditional folder structure.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Loopio

Warum Responsive (formerly RFPIO) gewählt wurde

Part of the reason for the switch was largely due to the project management capabilities of Responsive (and the lack thereof in qvidian)

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Responsive (formerly RFPIO)

It was a close race, we liked the project management of Responsive better. Some of our team had experience with RFPIO as well.

Vorteile

Responsive is the best tool I've used so far and I've tried a couple. It's intuitive, clean, and they are always adding features that are easy to learn and enhance user experience vs. takeaway. I have also enjoyed their new certification program. It has really helped me to utilize the tool better for myself and company.

Nachteile

Price, but the sales team is a pleasure to work with and have been very helpful in meeting us where we are.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Loopio

Warum Responsive (formerly RFPIO) gewählt wurde

It wasn't providing the same search results as RFPIO within the library and RFPIO tool was more intuitive to me.

Zuvor genutzte Software

Loopio

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Responsive (formerly RFPIO)

Better usability and more intuitive design.

Vorteile

I like how seamless most things are, I like the review workflow, I like that many things are customizable for the organization

Nachteile

While most things are seamless, there are still some issues with linking the modules. We often try to find projects in the Recommended search that should be in our archive but these two entities are separate. Also there are spacing issues and formatting issues upon export. Merge tags also seem to add random spaces or make adding text around the merge tag difficult and time consuming. I've tried to float some of these issues to responsive but often they have just let me know that that is a known function of the software.

Vorteile

- Very user friendly
- Smooth transitions between tabs and sections
- Lots of options for sorting and filtering
- "Collections" feature is extremely helpful

Nachteile

- Copy and paste function sometimes doesn't work properly
- When I'm in a Q/A pair, I'm unable to see what (if any) collection the pair is a part of. You can see this with the tags, so I'd like to see it with collections as well

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Loopio

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Responsive (formerly RFPIO)

I wasn't a part of the decision-making process, however, my team told me that Responsive seemed easier to use and had a more robust database storage system in place.

Vorteile

> Supporting team collaboration through clear assignment of sections/questions/tasks
> Clear dashboard function that shows the tasks, progress and status of each question
> The export function helps to create bid documents with a uniform look/formatting.

Nachteile

It is not possible to
- search for possible Q/A-pairs in all completed projects (that are not part of the Answer Library)
- reliably update the source file
- to import read-only word/pdf-files with preset text-boxes to fill

It is difficult to collaborate with clients and/or vendors on an RFP, if they have more than one question to answer.

Vorteile

1. Quick Access to Relevant Content: Responsive AI has made it easy to find the most relevant materials for any proposal. This reduces time spent searching for content, improving efficiency and consistency.
2. Improved Consistency and Accuracy: Responsive has helped standardize language and style across different proposals, ensuring that branding and messaging remain consistent. It also reduces errors by providing content that has been vetted for accuracy and relevance.
Reduced Proposal Turnaround Time: With streamlined access to content, automated suggestions, and faster assembly, Responsive content libraries has significantly shorten the proposal development cycle.

Nachteile

I understand that the AI references the Content Library, but I would also like it to include responses based on information from documents uploaded to the tool.

Vorteile

There are many options for organizing the Content Library, from tags, to collections, to multiple responses to a question, and more. The project management feature is also useful, especially the option to invite guests to collaborate and not require them to make an account.

Nachteile

There are many minor glitches, which after contacting the support team, usually get fixed in a timely manner, but after a while I don't want to report every little thing and wished that the QA team would catch them before going into production. Also the customer care team is hit and miss, and we faced some communication issues when it came to billing.

Vorteile

Responsive's AI add-in has been a game changer for our team. The AI add-in not only helps speed up the response but also automates a lot of redundant tasks that the team had to perform.

Nachteile

Reponsive has recently changed their licensing model. The current licensing model doesn't support scaling without breaking the bank.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Loopio

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Responsive (formerly RFPIO)

We had existing relationship with RFPIO.

Vorteile

It is fairly intuitive and have most of the features that I want. Definitely easier to use than another other similar product I've used.

Nachteile

Would like a little more sophistication in some functions such as excluding certain items permanently from the duplication report. I also still manually load excel workbooks because the program has problems properly sorting complicated worksheets.

Vorteile

The collaboration features, the Auto Respond feature, the mapping of projects and easy export into the source document.

Nachteile

Not a con as such, perhaps an inherent limitation of source files, but I would like some more accommodation of trickier source documents that e.g. have conditional questions (e.g. if Yes, reply to next question, if Not, do not) or documents that show or hide questions depending on how you previously answered to the questions above. Not sure if something could be enhanced in the tool to accommodate this, or other non-user-friendly types of RFx source files.

Vorteile

Ease of proposal creation, and the ability to have an easily accessible and up-to-date content library.

Nachteile

We had some initial issues with answers not uploading correctly. It was resolved with the customer service team.

Vorteile

I love how Responsive has centralized our proposal process. It's much easier to manage multiple RFPs simultaneously, and the version control is excellent.

Nachteile

It took some time to fully understand the platform's capabilities and navigate the interface.

Vorteile

The feature of Responsive that multiple collaborators can work on an RFP simultaneously is amazing. Also, the features like the content library, review, etc are very useful.

Nachteile

Everything almost is perfect about the tool. I don't feel there is a drawback.

Vorteile

What I liked the most about Responsive is that it enables collaboration between various teams without the need to rely on external software. Its integration with Slack also enabled me to stay on top on any meaningful changes to RFPs I'm involved in.

Nachteile

The most problematic aspect of the software is its notification scheme. I often get Daily Task Reports for sections that are 100% complete and require no work from me as a contributor. My understanding is this cannot be limited by any setting.

Vorteile

I like how it acts as as repository for our Q&As and can also help with projects.

Nachteile

I don't like the lack of functionality around custom fields. For my company it is really important the AI doesn't give wrong info based on wrong product version.`

Vorteile

I like it’s user interface, and the use of AI.

Nachteile

I do not think the question matching is as good as it could be.

Vorteile

The extensive repository and auto-answer functionality

Nachteile

User interface can be improved better and more AI features are required which will help faster and accurate completion of RFP

Vorteile

I love the various tags, I also appreciate the ability to add questions sets and answers to the library for a reviewer to vet and then place for the entire team to use.

Nachteile

Sometimes charts and pictures do not retain the quality resolution

Vorteile

The progress tracking is nice and the ability to tag people for help on questions is useful.

Nachteile

The search is terrible. It constantly misidentifies what I'm searching for and shows completely unrelated results. Searching for answers is our main use case for this tool and it fails pretty miserably. I waste a lot of time in Responsive looking for things that should be straightforward.

Its always a crapshoot importing documents, a lot of time it messes up identifying the right questions and answers and i've lost track of how many times the answers get exported to the wrong cell.

Vorteile

It is Easy to use

It is Simple

Get the job done

Nachteile

There are no extra or advanced features like reporting or Searching capabilities.

Vorteile

The RFP tool features and functionality are good and responsive. And the tool is customer supportive.

Nachteile

The development and responsive of the tool

Vorteile

the consolidation of resources and the ease of searching and retrieval

Nachteile

No cons so far. One suggestion for improvement could be the integration of AI-driven search queries. This would allow users to receive suggestions based on asking questions rather than relying solely on keyword-based searches.

Vorteile

The way to handle RFP becomes very easy. The content library or the knowledge management platform is where we have benefited a lot.

Nachteile

The User Interface could be developed and it hangs a bit while loading the content library.

Vorteile

It is very easy to use and makes the business process management effective.

Nachteile

The user interface could be improved. deployment process can be improved.

Vorteile

Great way to effectively store, and track over time, responses to RFPs, Security Reviews and Questionnaires. It's great for knowledge management and makes it easy for our team to answer deep security questions.

Nachteile

Full text search still feels janky and unreliable compared to tags and filters.