Bitly's Challenge

Bitly's key challenges revolved around their constantly changing data and bi-coastal teams. With offices in San Francisco, Denver and New York it was hard to keep everyone on the same page with content marketing, product updates, client requests and feedback. To put it simply, Brenna Stanton, Revenue Team Project Manager was looking for "an internal tool that would help keep us accountable and make sure our information was up to date."

The main way the teams at Bitly communicated was through Slack. For example, there was a dedicated channel in Slack where sales reps could ask engineers technical questions. The Bitly engineering team loved communicating through Slack and it was an ingrained part of their workflow. However, they were getting bogged down by repetitive questions and it was wasting everyone's time. Sales reps could not find the answers they needed quickly searching in Slack which forced engineering to answer the same questions over and over again.

Brenna was in charge of implementing new tools across Bitly's organization and they needed a knowledge management solution that:

• Centralized knowledge in one easy to access place for their client-facing sales and customer success teams
• Made it easy to update knowledge for the Engineering team and other subject matter experts
• Kept information trusted and up-to-date

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The Solution

Guru's Slack bot augments Bitly's Slack experience and facilitates collaboration across the company

Guru is now the central knowledge repository for the entire Bitly organization. They store all types of knowledge from marketing content and one pagers to SalesOps processes and contracts.

Since implementing Guru, Bitly has been rolling back processes they previously utilized Slack for. Brenna expanded: "As much as we have pushed back from relying on it so heavily as a knowledge source, we've replaced sending a doc over a channel in Slack with storing and updating it in Guru."

Additionally, the sales and customer success team can now search for information stored in Guru directly in Slack to see if there's already an answer to their question. As a result, the engineering team has seen a substantial decrease in duplicate questions and has reduced the amount of time spent asking questions that were already answered.

"When on a client call it's important to be able to provide as many answers as possible, Guru allows me to look up technical and product resources on the fly to add to the discussion."

Guru's Q&A Workflow keeps the engineering and sales teams on the same page

Bitly's client-facing teams in particular have benefitted from using Guru. The sales and customer success team's use Guru's Q&A functionality to ask their engineering team any questions they might have. If a question is asked in Slack, the engineering team can easily answer the question and then use the Guru Slack bot to capture that answer for the entire sales team's benefit.

Even if people ask questions that have already been answered and stored in Guru, the engineering team can easily pull that knowledge directly in Slack and quickly post a response that's been approved by the team.

One common use case that Guru has helped improve is the way engineering and product teams communicate product changes to their client-facing teams. The Bitly product team has been diligently updating Guru to provide those teams with new platform updates and resources. The engineering team has gotten used to answering Guru cards with client questions rather than always reverting back to Slack's constantly changing state.

The Results

Since implementing Guru, Bitly has experienced results that directly improved upon the key challenges their organization was facing, most importantly was the amount of repeat questions subject matter experts were receiving.

"We saw an overall decrease in the #slack-eng channel and in duplicate questions as we continued to push people to answer their own questions within Guru."

Brenna Stanton
Revenue Team Project Manager‍
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More telling, was how organically Guru was adopted across the organization. Initially, Guru was only meant to be used by the engineering and sales teams, but Brenna quickly realized how the entire Bitly organization could benefit from using the solution.

"While we started using Guru to help organize and relay information between our sales and engineering teams, it has since been rolled out ot the entire company, encompassing 7 departments and over 80 employees."

Brenna Stanton
Revenue Team Project Manager‍
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With Guru, Bitly is able to augment their existing Slack workflows, and help facilitate collaboration between disparate teams.