Outsourcing vs. AI: How SiftHub helped Observe Inc respond faster and better

About Observe Inc

Observe Inc is a SaaS observability company dedicated to transforming business data into actionable insights. In their mission to become the market leader in observability, the company leverages AI-powered tools to enable engineering, DevOps, and SRE teams to troubleshoot incidents more efficiently, thereby enhancing customer experiences.

Lack of control over questionnaire timelines & submissions

Before SiftHub, the solutions team at Observe Inc completed questionnaires by outsourcing them through a vendor to external folks. 

“The whole process hinged on human beings to get things done and the turnaround time was neither quick, nor consistent. It took a few days for them to get back to us for each questionnaire, and depending on the quality of the person they got to complete it, the quality of responses varied too.” Diwakar Prabhakar, VP Presales & Customer Success at Observe Inc, explained. 

The human element in the entire process allowed room for errors and mistakes, and his team found that they couldn’t trust the answers they got. Each questionnaire would have to be reviewed thoroughly, making it double the effort. On top of this, they found that the external folks filling questionnaires had a hard time grasping the complexity of their product.

“Our product is always evolving – it changes almost every month. It’s hard enough for the presales team to stay on top of changes, but it becomes impossible for someone outside the company to keep up. And not just keep up, but also be able to write relevant quality responses on these new updates. We realized something needed to change.” 

Onboarding an AI sales engineer to enhance presales productivity

Diwakar recalled spending one hour with the SiftHub AI Platform, seeing how it worked, understanding how to use it, and that was it – he was convinced on the value it would bring to his team. 

“The whole RAG and LLM approach SiftHub uses is what caught my attention immediately. I get to control what documents are used to generate content, and if something is irrelevant or needs to be changed, I can go in to update or remove that information. This assures me of the accuracy and quality of responses I get from the platform. The fact that it’s so easy to use is a great bonus!”

Top feature call-outs on SiftHub:

SiftAI – Chrome Extension & SiftHub bot for Slack: “The extendability of the platform has been a game-changer for us. The seamless way in which the platform integrates with Slack, for example, is huge. Now, if the customer success team has any questions, they go directly to the SiftHub bot on Slack and use that to get their answers. The Chrome Browser Extension has also been a very powerful tool for our team at Observe Inc. Most RFPs or questionnaires use Google Sheets or Excel in some way, shape or form after all.”

Autofill: “Responding to a questionnaire used to be a long drawn out process requiring multiple stakeholders – AEs, SEs, product teams, security or IT teams - to come together for a chunk of time. Now, we’ve gone from needing a minimum of 4 people to not even needing 1 person on the task full-time, freeing up 3 members of my team to take up more high value tasks – and that’s entirely thanks to SiftHub’s Autofill capability. Now we get to a first draft of a completed questionnaire in just 10 minutes, and the entire process has gone from taking 1 week to just a day or two.“

Diwakar also specifically called out the efforts of the team in getting Observe Inc onboarded and deriving value from the platform as soon as possible. “The SiftHub team is awesome to work with - I don’t want to minimize the importance of that. They are always really responsive and supportive when we need anything, and that in turn helps us drive success.”

Would Observe Inc recommend SiftHub to others?

“I’ve already recommended SiftHub to a few folks. Not too many people have discovered the value a product like SiftHub can bring to their businesses. I’ve seen the improvements SiftHub has done for us – and so I can vouch for its effectiveness. I work in the product industry so I don’t get excited by too many products - but this is definitely one of them.”