TechBytes with Dorian Stone, General Manager at Grammarly Business

How does Grammarly work for Enterprise and individual contributors?

Grammarly’s AI-powered writing assistant helps 30 million people and 30,000 teams communicate more clearly and effectively every day. With integration across multiple platforms and devices, we serve as a helpful coach empowering our customers wherever they communicate.

Our product offerings use AI to analyze and identify ways to enhance writing. This goes beyond spelling and grammar, offering suggestions around many dimensions of communication, including correctness (grammar and writing mechanics), clarity (conciseness and readability), engagement (vocabulary and variety), and delivery (tone). For individuals, our free version helps keep personal, everyday writing correct and concise, while Grammarly Premium delivers all other advanced features to strengthen and refine writing.

For enterprises and organizations of all sizes, ineffective communication is one of the greatest—and often overlooked—costs today, impacting business results and deteriorating customer experiences. Inadequate and off-brand interactions lower productivity, create frustration and confusion among customers, and affect the bottom line. Grammarly Business addresses these challenges to help our customers achieve their business goals through better communication, whether in marketing, customer support, sales, HR, or beyond.

Grammarly Business delivers all the features of our Premium offering along with administrative controls and built-in, customizable style guides. The result is more impactful, on-brand communication that boosts business performance and ensures customers always feel like they’re interacting with the same company, regardless of where they communicate. And it’s all backed by seamless platform integration and stringent, enterprise-grade security and privacy.

How do you use AI and ML applications/technology to improve your customer experience and forecasting? 

Developing a consistent, compelling brand experience across channels is an immense challenge. That’s why our AI-powered solutions focus on helping organizations deliver greater brand consistency, clarity, and engagement.

For customer support and marketing functions—including our own customer-facing teams—Grammarly Business drives more effective communication to enhance the customer experience. With more personalized, efficient interactions, brands can enhance trust and build greater relationships with customers and prospects. On average, our customers improve efficiency by as much as 20%, with customer support teams seeing up to a 17% increase in customer satisfaction scores and up to 22% more support tickets responded to per hour.

We deliver these outcomes through a combination of rule-based approaches and machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing (NLP) techniques to enhance writing. With our AI capabilities, our focus is on helping people and organizations communicate effectively—but we are not in the business of formulating ideas for them to the point where we replace them. We always build keeping in mind our customers’ unique qualities, style, and characteristics, providing support and assistance to enhance communications in line with their own objectives.

Tell us more about your product roadmap for 2021?

Grammarly Business has seen tremendous growth in the past year, with our enterprise-grade offering now operating across organizations of any scale. We made several advancements to expand our AI capabilities into new dimensions and launched our company style guides to help organizations drive greater brand consistency.

We’re excited to build on this momentum through our product roadmap, and our team is working hard to develop new features and capabilities for language and communication support. Looking ahead, we’re excited to be bringing our popular tone detector to our mobile keyboard. We’re also looking at features like bulk accept to let users quickly accept multiple suggestions, intent detection to offer suggested phrases aligned with one’s tone, and ways to identify key takeaways to ensure important points aren’t missed.

For Grammarly Business, we’re specifically increasing our focus on delivering solutions that help organizations of all sizes reach their business objectives. This includes looking at targeted capabilities for teams like customer experience and support, marketing, sales, and HR, as well as exploring expanded analytics and admin features to give leaders even more insight into the impact Grammarly Business is having on their organizations.

What kind of talent and managers are you hiring for the New Year?

We’re always hiring! Our product is powered by advanced AI and much of what we’re creating has never been done before, so we’re looking for determined, dynamic folks who are excited by the opportunity to help build something new. Our values-driven culture comes first at Grammarly, so individuals must also align with our EAGER values—Ethical, Adaptable, Gritty, Empathetic, and Remarkable—which serve as our guide as we build, learn, and grow.

We’re particularly seeking engineers, research scientists, and data scientists interested in engaging on complex problems around machine learning, deep learning, and NLP to help us deliver sophisticated communication suggestions, adapt to all users, and scale across platforms. Our open engineering roles span software, system integration, application security, and DevOps, among others, including software engineers across the full stack and in machine learning, data platforms, mobile, business systems, and more.

Grammarly has dozens of open roles across our San Francisco, New York, Vancouver, and Kyiv offices.

Three predictions related to your industry or SaaS / Cloud security in your domain?

I see two major emerging trends that business, marketing, and customer experience (CX) leaders will need to address in 2021 to stay competitive in the market.

First, if left unchecked, ineffective communication will be a much higher financial and productivity cost to businesses. COVID-19 forced companies to quickly move to remote work models and adopt more systems for collaboration, while also building more diverse teams with different perspectives and habits. However, this abrupt pivot led to an increased lack of clarity between team members, resulting in slower output and inconsistencies in customer-facing communications that erode the customer experience. So what may be a manageable cost to businesses normally has the potential to skyrocket if companies do not prioritize quality, consistent communication as a strategic imperative.

Second, CX and marketing teams will need to be adaptable and tackle new, diverse challenges. As COVID-19 has led to more distanced, digital channels and communications, customers are increasingly sensitive to inconsistent or inefficient interactions. Leaders must ensure their largely remote teams have the skills, diversity, and knowledge to address changing customer needs.

This leads to my third prediction: organizations will need to consider business outcomes when upskilling teams. Too many organizations are investing heavily in upskilling initiatives without a clearly defined objective; instead, they need to adopt an outcome-based approach, considering the overarching business goal they want to achieve, then build customized strategies and programs to support that objective. In certain cases, upskilling as a dedicated strategy may not even be required based on available technologies.

Thank you for answering all our questions!