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Managing thirteen different products such as die cut stickers, wall graphics, and transfer decals and supporting custom orders from personal to enterprise size companies (including Amazon, Facebook, and Netflix) is a sophisticated operation to run. Sticker Mule needs to proof the artwork, print the stickers, and ship them in five business days or less. It's a very complicated process and that means creating a consistent and efficient customer support experience is essential to their success.

The Challenge

Anthony Thomas, General Manager and Co–Founder of Sticker Mule, has a highly distributed team and needed a better system to share and create knowledge, as well as manage the internal and external FAQs that the support team uses everyday.

The ticketing system they used allowed them to store FAQs and responses, but their internal team knowledge was difficult to find and the process of creating content was cumbersome. They tried other knowledge sharing platforms like wikis and content repositories, but the team did not adopt them and the system of retrieving information wasn't efficient.

When considering Guru, Anthony had two goals: he wanted to enable his team to immediately access and search across both the internal and external FAQs, so support reps could quickly and consistently respond to customer inquiries. And, as a manager he wanted a system that would allow him to easily create, manage, and scale their team knowledge.

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The Solution

Sticker Mule now includes all of their customer support information in Guru. This knowledge includes their internal support processes, as well as their published external FAQs. It has been organized and structured in Guru Boards, and the team can easily access the knowledge through the browser extension and web app. Their use of Guru has improved the team's processes in several ways:

More Consistent Responses

Sticker Mule handles hundreds of customer inquiries and orders daily via email and Twitter. Before using Guru their support system separated their internal and external FAQs, which made it difficult for the team to collectively find all of the information they needed and increased the likelihood of inconsistent responses. Now, all of their internal and external knowledge can be stored in one place, so the customer support team can quickly create complete and consistent responses. Anthony described the change saying, "Without good processes all companies struggle with individual support agents handling the same response differently. Guru helps us avoid that."

The extension also makes it easier for them to find answers as they respond to customers. Anthony described the reps adoption of Guru saying, "They liked that they didn't need to jump into yet another application to find information and could access Guru quickly from a Chrome extension without interrupting their workflow. For example, they can look up FAQs while looking at a customer inquiry in our support system without needing to leave the current window."

Ease of Adoption and Use

Adoption was incredibly important, Sticker Mule wanted knowledge sharing to be a part of their company culture, so he needed a tool that everyone would be comfortable using. Additionally, the Sticker Mule teams are internationally distributed, so adopting a system company-wide was necessary for all of them to stay on the same page.

"It's essential to adopt something like Guru as soon as possible because you want to build good processes into your organization early and establish a good foundation, so as you grow, it's a part of who you are".

Anthony Thomas
GM and Co–Founder
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Anthony described his team's adoption of Guru saying, "We used the opinions of our team to judge if Guru was a success. Everyone liked Guru. No one liked wikis." As a manager he was also able to measure this adoption and team satisfaction with Guru's analytics, which shows overall team usage and individual users' statistics. This lets him quantitatively evaluate whether or not Guru is a good fit for the team. Anthony said,  "If our people are querying Guru it's a sign that Guru is providing value for that particular team." He continued saying, "You just intuitively know that if people are using Guru they're tapping each other's shoulders less and asking questions in Slack (or internal messaging system) less".

Scalable Across Your Teams

Sticker Mule initially started using Guru to help their support team; they have now expanded use across the organization. Each team has their own use case for Guru. Manufacturing uses it to contain additional information on their processes and checklists, HR uses it for company–wide policies, and the dev team uses it to keep track of and maintain the documentation of their tools and systems. Despite the differences, every team wanted to implement Guru, because it helps them create, access, and maintain essential knowledge. This was evident when Sticker Mule launched their new transfer sticker. The team designed a unique process for making transfer stickers and documented everything using Guru. Anthony said, "Guru was critical to making our transfer sticker launch go smoothly by keeping us all on the same page."

Guru also makes the process of creating and maintaining the most meaningful content for the team much easier. Anthony said, "The analytics also shows us card usage, which helps us know what cards to improve. We want to make sure the teams have all of the necessary information and analytics understand exactly what content they need". The opportunity to analyze content performance also helps new employees. Sticker Mule is growing and as they add employees Guru helps onboard them faster. "It's common to hear new people say they can't believe how easy it is to get started working for us".

The Results

Guru is the knowledge management solution for Sticker Mule and they continue rolling it out to the entire company. Anthony described it saying, "We try to use tools that become part of our overall platform for running Sticker Mule. For example, everyone company-wide uses Slack for communication and Asana for task management. It's nice to see people agreeing Guru is the ideal solution for knowledge management. Previously, we didn't have agreement on what tool worked best."