“Over-communication is my battle cry.”

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That’s how Favor Delivery’s Knowledge Management Program Lead, Julia Berg, describes the fundamental way her company approaches internal comms. In the on-demand delivery world, competition is fierce—a factor that elevates things like internal alignment and connection to a real difference-maker; the kind that affects the bottom line.

But in a remote environment where internal teams support customers, delivery runners, and merchants, how does Favor keep over-communication from becoming, well, overwhelming?

“When you're able to point to one north star for all of your standard operating procedures (SOPs), it's simple, things get easier, and you can share that information out as much as you want.”

For Favor, that north star is Guru.

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Compass confusion

Before implementing Guru’s knowledge-sharing platform, Favor didn’t have a centralized informational hub, a fact Julia discovered after moving from the Marketing team into a new Knowledge Management role in the Support org. That was right around the time Favor was experiencing a spike in usage and support contact volume due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic; she quickly realized that that lack of centralized info was negatively impacting operations.

“We expected specialists to remember every single response, for every single situation, for every customer. This not only created internal misalignment but an inconsistent customer experience as well. There was a lot of tacit knowledge, and we had no documentation at all—which is incredibly problematic for a company with almost 200 Support team members. So when I stepped into the role, I knew it was going to be a fresh start.”

Looking up

As Favor started to migrate their old knowledge into Guru, they took the opportunity to update and consolidate their processes. In the process, they found that using Guru wasn’t just a benefit to existing team members: new hires were finding it incredibly valuable as well. “New hires struggle if they come into the role and they have no documentation to guide them. There were a lot of shoulder taps and Slack interruptions for mentors and leadership asking, ‘Hey, what's the policy on this?’—which affected internal efficiency and customer experience,” explains Julia.

Getting all of that knowledge into Guru helped Favor increase adherence to internal processes and customer satisfaction: both metrics now hover around 80%, increasing by 5% in under two months.

But it’s not just the metrics that Julia points to when talking about Guru; it’s something larger.

“[If we lost access to Guru] we would lose everything that we’ve been trying to drive at Favor which is building a knowledge-driven culture. Building a knowledge base, a hub where people feel comfortable to trust what's in there and share it out.”

Julia Berg
Knowledge Management Program Lead

Finding the north star

So if over-communication is Julia’s battle cry, how has adding another app into the mix made the conversations that happen more efficient instead of overwhelming?

“For us, over-communication includes asking ‘Hey, have you checked Guru?’, simply sharing a Card, or sending an announcement. Where Guru helps out is by being that hub for us and saying, "Hey, all the knowledge in here? We've vetted it; we’re working on it, we're continuing to improve it, reuse it. And this is where you need to go if you're looking for a certain answer for an SOP."

Ensuring that questions get consistently correct answers every time and creating habits around searching for trusted information has given Favor employees something else in their work: autonomy. And not having to repeatedly answer the same questions has allowed the team to focus on improving processes from the bottom up.

Julia puts it this way: “We might have people who make mistakes in creating content, but we also have other people who can help them out. Giving employees that autonomy to create and to improve…to say, ‘Hey, I don't think this is worded right, let’s fix it,’ is just treating people like they should be treated, which is empowering.”