How commercetools Transformed Its RFP Process by Switching From Responsive to Arphie

For several years, commercetools used Responsive, a legacy RFP tool, to manage the team’s RFP process. At first, the system worked “okay,” but over time as commercetools grew and the volume of RFPs completed by the team increased, the cracks widened:

1. Maintenance drag. Content moderation demands in Responsive quickly became onerous, managing clean-up turned into a recurring project, ultimately offsetting the very time savings RFP software was meant to deliver, and resulting in answer quality deterioration.
   ‍
2. Poor search accuracy. The system would frequently miss the context of the search and return completely unrelated results. This resulted in users having to rewrite the search three or four times before finding the answer that they knew was stored somewhere in the system.
   ‍
3. Lack of consistency. As individual contributors updated Q&A pairs, responses ended up inconsistent, varying in tone, style, and even language, making it clear they had been written by different people.

The current tooling was eating into commercetools’ time and efficiency - it was time to make a change.

“We got to the point where we were spending a significant amount of time manually auditing and editing. We lost trust and stopped seeing the time benefits that were the original reason we sought out RFP software.” — Greg Kieran, Director, Solutions Engineering (Presales) EMEA

The team ran a competitive evaluation, looking at Loopio (another legacy RFP tool), and other AI-native players. What made Arphie come out on top was: 

• AI that works out-of-the-box. Other vendors offered AI “bolt-ons” that did not feel trustworthy or core to the product. Arphie stood out with an AI-native approach that actually delivered high-quality first drafts and minimized the need for content moderation.
  

• Ease of partnership. Arphie wasn’t just software: it became a partner in scaling commercetools’ RFP process. When the team suggested ideas, Arphie quickly shipped new features in response, showing they listened and acted. That level of responsiveness built real trust. In addition, Arphie removed sales friction by making it simple to launch a POC with commercetools data — fast setup, hands-on support, and an intuitive experience that allowed the team to test and see real value from day one.

• Better usability. Other platforms felt “distracting… there was too much happening on the screen.” Arphie’s workflow was intuitive, focused, and built for efficiency, honed from insights as a result of carefully listening to Arphie’s base of power users, looking to get the most done – with the fewest amount of clicks.

Arphie worked hand-in-hand with commercetools’ global Solutions Engineering team to deliver solutions that directly addressed their pain points:

• Fast, intuitive implementation bundled directly into the offering. Unlike other vendors that quoted weeks of setup and extra fees, Arphie was up and running right away. With white-glove onboarding of ingesting the knowledge base and a single training session, the Solutions Engineering team was ready to go. Arphie’s out-of-the-box simplicity meant no steep learning curve and no friction – the Solutions Engineering team felt comfortable diving in from day one.

• Built for every workflow. Arphie flexed to fit the way each team worked—SEs managed full projects in the app, while AEs and CSMs tapped into Arphie’s powerful AI answering engine in Slack for quick, ad hoc answers. This configuration kept ownership clear, reduced noise, and ensured everyone could benefit from Arphie without added complexity.

• Content surfaced when the team needed it, without endless moderation. Instead of tasking someone to manually manage a Q&A library, Arphie connects directly with trusted sources and automatically surfaces relevant content when needed, complete with citations. That shift eliminated the need for heavy, ongoing moderation. 

• Customizable, consistent outputs. Arphie gave commercetools the ability to set rules around tone, format, and length, making responses more consistent than ever. Whether condensing long product answers into 50 words, or ensuring hundreds of responses align in style, the team could finally produce content that felt uniform and polished in a matter of minutes.
  

• Transparency builds trust. Arphie shows exactly where answers come from—whether from the Q&A library, the company’s Google Drive files, or commercetools’ documentation and website—giving the team confidence in accuracy, and easing concerns around AI hallucination, as well as the logical thought process Arphie’s AI agents took, making it easy to see how answers came together.

What did this all result in? Time reclaimed. By eliminating endless hours rewriting answers or moderating content, Arphie cut the team’s RFP workload by an estimated 68%.

“We wanted a tool that was truly simple and easy—we shouldn’t need hours of training. Arphie fit exactly that, and nobody on our team has ever said they couldn’t figure it out. That was really important.”