Constant Contact wants to give employees back time to do the “fun stuff”
A conversation with Chief Strategy Officer Stephanie Ting
AT A GLANCE
1,400+
employees
4
functions using Writer
40%
faster time to market
WATCH THE CLIPS
LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW
Constant Contact headquarters
Waltham, Massachusetts
Industry
Technology
Key features used
Recaps Style guide Custom apps
Listen to the Constant Contact story or read the edited story below
Writer is the full-stack generative AI platform for enterprises. We empower your entire organization to accelerate growth, increase productivity, and ensure compliance.
Writer transforms work by delivering high-quality outputs that are accurate, compliant, and on-brand. Our platform consists of Writer-built LLMs, a Knowledge Graph that connects our models to your internal data sources, AI guardrails to enforce your rules, a flexible application layer, and an ecosystem of robust APIs and integrations. Our enterprise-grade platform doesn’t use your data in model training and complies with SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, PCI, GDPR, and Privacy Shield.
Stephanie Ting is the Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) of Constant Contact, where she leads corporate strategy and strategic partnerships. At Constant Contact, Stephanie takes advantage of her strong background in growth and operational initiatives to discover creative and innovative solutions for the company.
Read or listen to the story of how Stephanie and the Constant Contact team are using Writer across different functions to create more consistent and on-brand content and expand their knowledge base.
What sparked your initial interest in pursuing a generative AI platform like Writer, and how did you evaluate different options?
As we thought about how we want to improve productivity and continue to evolve, it made sense for us to take advantage of the great innovation that companies like Writer are bringing to market.
“As we thought about how we want to improve productivity and continue to evolve, it made sense for us to take advantage of the great innovation that Writer brings to market.”
We thought hard about data privacy because we have a decent amount of small businesses on our platform that may not have enterprise-grade security. We wanted to partner with a company that had a thoughtful approach to data privacy, in addition to typical feature functionality. We also really cared about ease of implementation and how quickly we could demonstrate value internally.
There were two major reasons we decided to partner with Writer. One is the fact that Writer has a unique approach to data privacy. We love the fact that we own our data. Two is the flexibility of the platform: the fact that we could create our own custom apps and that Writer makes sure they work in our workflow.
“We chose Writer because we wanted to partner with a company that had a thoughtful approach to data privacy. With Writer, we love the fact that we own our data.”
Stephanie Ting Chief Strategy Officer
How are you using Writer across different functions?
We’re using Writer across two major functions today: our marketing and customer support teams. There are three major use cases for Writer that have jumped out to us. The first is content creation for our blog, customer lifecycle marketing, knowledge base, and community efforts.
The second is a style guide. We create lots of content that pulls in messaging, statistics and trends from a variety of internal and external resources. Using Writer to create a style guide for consistency in voice, and terms is very important to us.
The third use case is recaps for summarizing audio and video content. We host a lot of podcasts and webinars, and Writer helps us recap those into blogs, articles, or other forms of content to share with our customers.
The process was very manual before we started using Writer. What’s exciting with Writer recaps is we can publish content more efficiently, and that translates into more value for our small businesses customers. Additionally, it helps us be more consistent with our brand guidelines.
With our support team, there are two fundamental use cases. One is new content in our knowledge base, and the other is our existing content. We’ve got thousands of articles that we’ve created through our 29 years of life, and we want to make sure they’re always up-to-date with the most relevant guidance we can provide and free of manual errors like broken links. Writer helps us achieve this goal quickly.
The second use case is creating net new content for our knowledge base. Small businesses want help. They want education. The best thing we can do to support our customers is help them grow through educational content, and Writer helps us increase throughput.
“The best thing we can do to support our customers is help them grow through educational content, and Writer helps us increase throughput.”
Stephanie Ting Chief Strategy Officer
Are there use cases that Constant Contact is looking to explore in the future?
There are two additional areas where we feel Writer could make a positive impact. One is with the product team, supporting our product descriptions, and keeping UI/UX language consistent with the marketing messaging.
The second opportunity is with our HR team. We see a pretty interesting opportunity to use Writer for talent acquisition. This could be job descriptions, onboarding new employees, and also learning and development for our employees, similar to what we want to accomplish for our customers in small businesses.
Using FAQ generator in Writer
How are you and your team thinking about measuring impact?
We want to improve not just productivity, but also employee job satisfaction, which is a higher-order metric that’s somewhat difficult to measure. Ultimately, if we can use Writer to do some of the more mundane tasks, then our employees can spend their time doing the fun stuff. We want them being creative and thinking strategically about how and what to communicate and not spending their time worrying about things like commas, periods, and spelling.
“With Writer, it’s been a really smooth onboarding and our teams are super excited.”
Stephanie Ting Chief Strategy Officer
What advice do you have for other leaders beginning their AI journey?
Don’t be afraid. It’s really important to bring teams along for the journey. They need to see that AI can be a very powerful tool to help augment their responsibilities so they can truly be more strategic and creative.
The Writer team has done a wonderful job of onboarding our team, and we’re starting to see a long-term vision. It’s been a really smooth onboarding and our teams are super excited.
