Before the Vendorful AI Assistant can complete a questionnaire for you, it is critical that you provide training data. How to do that is covered at length in Training the AI Assistant on Your Data. Please make sure that you complete the steps detailed in that document before proceeding. Assuming you have uploaded training data, we can dive into using the AI Assistant to deliver a first draft of a questionnaire response in minutes.
Getting Started
The current version of the product supports XLSX and DOCX questionnaires, which are the most commonly-used formats. That said, if you have received a questionnaire in another format, you might consider copying and pasting into a spreadsheet to get the best experiences with the AI Assistant.
Provided you have your questionnaire in a compatible format, you're ready to get rolling. You will need to upload the questionnaire into the Vendorful platform. You can access the proper part of the application by clicking "Response Assistant" on the left sidebar.
Uploading the Questionnaire
Once you've done that, you will be presented with a page that shows in-progress and currently-completed responses. To have the AI complete a new response, you'll click the tab near that top that reads "Complete a Response."
If you were involved in loading previous questionnaires into your content library, the user experience in the next few steps will feel very familiar to you. Once you've reached the screen displayed above, you can drag-and-drop or click to select the questionnaire file from your computer. Once the file is uploaded, the application will take you to an annotator screen.
Annotating a Spreadsheet Questionnaire
The process of annotating involves specifying which text elements are questions and which corresponding cells should house the generated answers. The user experience is specifically designed to look like a spreadsheet so the interface should be quite familiar to you. One difference is that the spreadsheet tabs (or "sheets" as they are called in MS Excel) are listed above the grid. Each of these can be selected with a click. In the screenshot below, the sheet called "Questionnaire" is selected.
At the top of the page, you will see instructions regarding how to label questions and answers and what to do when you are done. In the paragraphs that follow, we'll dive in a bit deeper.
Labeling Questions
On the right side of the screen, you will see a widget that reads, "Selection Mode." Here, you can indicate whether you are going to label questions or answers or clearly something that has been labeled. We strongly recommend labeling the questions first. To do that, make sure that "QUESTIONS" is selected in the "Selection Mode" box and begin clicking in the cells that have questions. You will want to avoid section and subsection headers as well as other explanatory text. Remember, the focus is on the questions.
Another way to approach the labeling task is to bulk highlight. This can be done in two ways:
- Hold down the mouse button and drag the mouse across all the text that you labeled as a question
- Select the letter on top the column, which will cause everything in the column to be labeled a question
As cells are labeled, they will change color to light blue. Bear in mind Vendorful preserves the formatting of the spreadsheet that was uploaded, so you might see other things that are colored blue. In the example below, the spreadsheet has a darker blue hue for cells with section headers. The lighter blue cells are labeled as questions.
Labeling Answer Cells
The process of labeling answers is almost identical to labeling questions. Just as with question labels, you can click one cell at a time, drag the mouse across a number of cells, or click the letter at the column header. When an answer label is applied, the cell will turn green.
In some questionnaires like RFPs, there may be multiple cells designated as places to put answer information for a single question. Typically, this will happen if there is something like a "Yes/No" option and then an additional cell for commentary. If you see this, you should mark both cells, i.e., the one with the multiple choice selection and the one for commentary. Here's an example of what this might look like:
Please note that while there is a Yes/No/NA column, not every question falls into that format. For example, the very first question is "What is the name of your organization?" Since that is going to be answered in the Comment cell only, you would not label its associated Yes/No/NA cell as an answer. Simply leave it blank.
Clearing Annotations
If you mistakenly annotate some cells or want to undo specific cells when you've annotated an entire column in a bulk action, you can select the "Clear" annotation mode. Once you've done that, any cell you click will have its annotation removed.
Completing the Annotation Process
Once you've annotated a sheet, you will see an annotation count next to the sheet name.
If you have annotated all of the sheets and question/answers that you want, you're ready to engage the AI Assistant. Simply click the "Submit" button and the Assistant will go to work, drafting your response.
Annotating a Document Questionnaire
Word documents are less structured than Excel documents, which makes the annotation process different. With Vendorful's current implementation, you can mark all of the questions in a Word document, but the document is not subsequently modified to include the answers in the same way as Excel. There is an additional step, which involve manually copying the answers into the Word document. You will still see tremendous time savings, but it's not as seamless as the Excel version. We are exploring how we can further improve and automate the user experience with Word documents.
Once the document is loaded into Vendorful, you will annotate the questions. Here's how an annotated Word document looks like:
Please note that the annotation options in the "Selection Mode" box are a bit different. There is no way to mark a space for an answer (as detailed previously) but there is a new option called "Merge." Generally, you will annotate a question and be done with it. But since Word is less well structured than Excel, it's possible that a question could be split into two paragraphs, maybe even with a carriage return between them. If this is the case, you will want to label each of them as a question. Then, you'll click "Merge," and then click them again. This will have the effect of combining those two separate entities into a single question.
Configuring Generation Settings
Vendorful provides fine-grained control over the content and parameters that are used to generate answers. You can learn more about this by clicking to our helpdesk article on Generation Settings.
Reviewing the Answers
A few minutes after you've submitted the annotated questionnaire, you will be automatically redirected to a page that will allow you to review the answers that were generated by the AI Assistant. When trained on good data, the Assistant generally does a good job on most of the questions. Despite that, it's important to remember that this is a first draft so it is important to review the generated answers to make sure that they are, in fact, consistent with your expectations.
In some cases, you will have subject matter experts or colleagues who are best equipped to review some of the answers. With a few mouse clicks, you can assign answers to them for review.
Now let's begin by looking at the review screen and then break it down into components.
The Buttons
On the upper left, there are clickable filters:
Clicking these will result in the display of only those question-answer combinations that match the filter criteria. If, for example, you clicked "Missing Answer," you would see only those questions that the AI Assistant did not answer. Bear in mind that "Answered (human)" will not appear until such time as a user adds/edits an answer to a question.
On the upper right, there are two buttons:
Clicking "Annotate" will return you to the annotation screen.
"Download Response" will download the completed questionnaire in the original format, i.e., colors, formulae, fonts, etc. should be consistent with what was originally uploaded.
"Answer Unanswered Questions" will have the AI take a crack at answering any unanswered questions. This is typically only effective if you've changed your Generation Settings or added new content. Otherwise, it's going to look at the same content it did previously and if that was insufficient to answer questions before, it likely will be again.
"Import Custom Answers into Content Library" allows you to quickly add new content into the library. When you answer an unanswered question or edit a generated answer, this information can then be used to answer questions in subsequent questionnaires.
The Questions and Answers
The remaining UI displays questions and their associated answers:
You can see the question, answer, how the answer was entered (the AI Assistant or a particular user), the ability to edit the answer, skip the answer, assign the question/answer, and approve the answer. and a pencil, which takes you to an editor. While we strongly recommend a review and approval process, once everything looks fine, and there is no need to edit any answers, then you can simply export the completed questionnaire.
However, if there are unanswered questions or answers that you elect to edit, you can click the "Edit Answer" button and you will be taken to an answer edit page.
Let's take a look at the different components of this page.
You can see the question and the current answer. To edit the current answer, simply begin typing into the text box. If you change your mind, you'll be presented with a button that lets you reset to the generated answer.
Now let's look at the bottom part of this page, where we see some tabs.
Let's focus on the lower half of this. First, we see some tabs:
Each of those tabs will display different information.
- Latest References — shows answers to questions that were deemed similar in previous questionnaires as well as other related information from your content library.
- User Answers — displays all answers to this question that were manually entered by users for this questionnaire
- Generated Answers — lists related answers that were automatically generated by the AI Assistant.
For each answer listed, there is a clickable circle in a column with a header that reads "Select." By clicking the circle, or even the text,, you will replace the existing answer text with the answer text associated with the selected circle. This provides a quick way to change answers if you have one that you would like to re-use. Once the new answer information has populated the text box, it can be edited by the user.
Generating a New Answer
While it's usually easy to manually edit an answer, there are some circumstances where you might want to use the AI to generate a new one. To start this process, click the "Generate New" button. This will take you to a screen where you have fine-grained control over the answer generation process. These options are covered in detail in the our help document called "Configuring Answer Generation Settings."
Exporting the Questionnaire
Once you have completed the process of reviewing and editing the answers, you are ready to download the completed questionnaire. If you recall, there are two buttons on the upper right side of the review screen. Once is labeled "Download Response." When you click that button, completed questionnaire will be downloaded in its original format (if it's Excel), i.e., colors, formulae, fonts, etc. should be consistent with what was originally uploaded. If you have uploaded a Word document, a CSV file will be downloaded from which you can copy and paste answers into the original Word document.
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