Employee enablement information in la-la land

For Alex Stowell, Qualia’s Senior Manager of Customer Success Operations, the ad hoc operations and lack of data depositories was causing friction. “The CS team didn't have any operations folks, they didn't have a dedicated [team], so it was very ad hoc. Nothing was clean, nothing was consistent. That was driving me crazy.” 
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Qualia’s CS team is complex, they have multiple teams from onboarding to renewal to expansion and CMS’s that all fall under the umbrella of support. Their support team is continuously pulling people up and promoting from within. As such, they are constantly ramping up and training new hires. When they were working in the office and newbies were strategically seated next to tenured team members, this worked out great. The answers to their questions were one desk over. When COVID-19 meant an abrupt shift to a fully remote work, rapidly onboarding the new hires that came through the career growth ladder proved more difficult.

“We had our training and internal comms information scattered across our information platforms. We had it in our internal knowledge base. We had it in our secure drives. But it felt like the answers to internal questions lived in la-la land. It was all over the place and nobody could easily find anything that they needed fast enough.”

Alex Stowell
‍Senior Manager, Customer Success Operations

Alex realized that his team needed an internal information repository that could document operational processes, boost ramp time for new remote hires, and help to get their team’s content out of la la land and into one single tool. 

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To kick off the search for a fix they began sifting through their various information silos, “We found a bunch of old documents that people needed to stop accessing. Let's turn them off. Let's have a system where we verify and approve the information.”

Consolidating knowledge

In March when everyone went to work from home, Alex went to pull the trigger on implementing Guru as their knowledge management solution. “We wanted to ensure efficiency was top of mind and that people were not spending time just digging around, searching for data and information that may be true, may not be true.”
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They had their reservations around implementing a new tool — especially during such a hectic transition to remote work. Alex worried that the entire lift of migrating knowledge into Guru would fall on his shoulders, or worse, fall off of manager's radars. To his surprise, that wasn’t the case at all. He pulled in SMEs, trained them on Guru, “and then they went to town.” 

“We got really good feedback early on from the support team that it was making their lives more efficient. They were able to get to cases. And then we were able to train and ramp people."

"The greatest impact of Guru has been giving us a single knowledge repository so everyone on the team knows where to go to find information. For our support team, we've integrated our external facing knowledge base with internal resources so they can search everything via Guru. It saves a ton of time and improves the quality of our responses. It's also been extremely helpful as we remotely ramp new hires so they know where to go to find information.”

Brain Thome
VP Customer Experience

Remotely rolling out a new tool was much less chaotic than Alex anticipated. The support team was seeing great early success metrics and SMEs were giving instant positive feedback — what he didn’t expect however was how quickly other teams across the company would want in.

The spread of the solution

People were getting wind of the new product that the CS team had been utilizing, “somehow Guru got around the company where I ended up selling it to each individual team thereafter.” Even in a remote setting, teams across the board at Qualia recognized the value of a single source of company truth.

Qualia’s marketing team caught on when they heard of a tool that would help them reach their OKR of consolidating marketing content into a single library. Alex explained how marketing took the solution of knowledge management and ran with it on their own, “They took all of their content and plopped it into Guru. Now we have one library for all of our marketing content. So whether you're on support, whether you're on sales, whether you're a CSM, you have access to all things marketing that live all in the same portal. You don't ever have to leave it again.”

More recently, they’ve expanded the solution to their sales teams, “The sales team's feedback has been astonishing… the sales ops [team is] completely bought in and sold on the idea of Guru.” 

Subject matter experts are getting the time back in their day that they would otherwise be spending answering repeat questions in Slack, customers are getting correct responses to their questions quicker, and company-wide, Qualia’s teams have access to the reliable information that they need to do their jobs.