The Challenge

Finding an internal knowledge base solution had been on Wrike's roadmap for a while. For content creators like Stephanie Westbrook, Documentation and Community Manager, who wrote Wrike's help center and created internal content for the support team, managing the content and keeping it up-to-date was a challenge. For content consumers, like the sales and support team the problem was being able to easily access and find information, especially while on a call.

Wrike was using their own software internally as a knowledge base, but that was a challenge for the sales team, who were usually logged into demo accounts to show Wrike to prospects, not their personal accounts. As a result, the workflow to find relevant sales information forced the reps to constantly switch from their demo and personal accounts which hampered their productivity. Even in their personal accounts, there was a lot of content that the sales team didn't need to see which cluttered search results.

Slack helped alleviate some of the problems by acting as a "Watercooler" channel where reps could ask their colleagues questions. But this solution was not scalable as their sales team continued to grow and more and more unanswered questions filled the channel.

In searching for a knowledge management solution, Stephanie was looking for a few key criteria:

• Keep sales and support team members in their workflow to reduce time spent searching for information.
• A way to store and organize their existing information so it was easily findable.
• A tool that was visually appealing. Stephanie knew change would be hard to implement across the entire company, so having a well-designed solution would help combat resistance to change.

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The Solution

Guru saves time for both content creators and content consumers at Wrike

In order to make the case to implement Guru across Wrike, Stephanie knew she would need to convince her CRO on the ROI of a knowledge sharing solution. In her internal presentation she focused the discussion of ROI on the amount of time that would be saved by the reps and agents searching for information as well as her time savings in maintaining the content.

Guru's verification engine helps reduce Stephanie's time spent maintaining and updating information. Having distinguishable owners of content allows the sales and support teams at Wrike to know who to reach out to if they have any questions regarding that specific piece of content. It also empowers owners of content to be more proactive in keeping content up-to-date. Stephanie expands, "Before, the process to update information was very reactive. So if I heard about something changing or someone pinged me, then I would update it. But now, Guru helps remind me to actively go and check to make sure our content are up-to-date."

Guru now houses all the information the support and sales teams need. Guru's browser extension makes it easy for reps and agents to access accurate information directly in their workflow, while Boards give Stephanie the organizational capabilities to make content easy to find.

"Guru gives us instant access to answers when we talk to our customers and have the knowledge of some of our 10-year experts. It also helps us keep up with the market as we are updating it often with competitor information and other useful information."

Victoria Walls
Business Development Rep
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As heavy Slack users, Stephanie also loves Guru's Slackbot. Previously, questions that got answered in Slack could easily get lost amongst the sea of conversations happening in a channel. Now, anyone can capture answers that happen throughout Slack or the "watercooler" channel with a simple emoji reaction. Stephanie added: "The ability to see when questions are answered and asked in Slack is huge. It gives me the speed of someone asking a Slack question but with the benefit of it being public knowledge for our entire team."

Integrating Guru into the company culture has established it as the single source of truth

To drive adoption of Guru across their entire organization, Stephanie made it a priority to enable each team the resources they needed to integrate Guru into their workflow. She appointed team leads or "Guru wizards and princesses" who were people in each department that were power users and could answer any questions relevant to Guru use in each department. For example, these team leads could help onboard new users and keep them aware of the department-specific use cases of Guru.

"Guru was so easy to adopt because it is a chrome extension and I did not have to change my workflow at all. I simply started searching and getting information from day one. Information that used to take me a long time to find via drive or asking around can now be found quickly in Guru."

Joel Gaona
Account Manager
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To further drive adoption, she created cheat sheets and one pagers that showed the team how Guru works and created GI's they could use in Slack to remind the team that Guru should be the first place they go to when they need to find something. The result of these efforts is that people now know where to go to find the information the need. As Stephanie puts it, "Content is more trusted. Maybe half of the team knew where to go to find information, but no one trusted it. Now if someone asks for something, they will ask if you checked Guru first. It seems like a small thing, but it's massive that our entire team simply knows where to go find information and trusts that it's accurate."

The Results

Since adopting Guru, Wrike has seen results that impact the productivity of their organization. Crucially, for content creators like Stephanie, the number of questions they are getting asked in the "Watercooler" Slack channel or through personal messages has declined significantly. Martin Sohikish, Account Executive at Wrike said: "We're enabling each other to find the information we need, but don't know, very quickly. Our Slack channels have benefitted a lot from this - only really crucial, one-off questions get posted in channels because so much day-to-day information is in Guru."

For content consumers, like Wrike's sales and support team, content is now easily accessible and actually used. The marketing team at Wrike was previously frustrated that the content they were creating was not being used. Now, with Guru they are able to track content usage and use those statistics to help drive future content creation in related topics.

Finally, adoption of the knowledge base itself is high. To continue to measure ROI, Stephanie tracks weekly active users of Guru and the # of searches the team does weekly. With continuously high weekly adoption, Guru helps increase productivity across Wrike's entire organization.

"I was a little skeptical about Guru at first, but it's one of the best choices our organization could have made. Our teammates love it and I would have never expected anyone to say they loved their internal knowledge base solution. The difference it has made is huge and I would recommend Guru to anyone."

Stephanie Westbrook
Documentation and Community Manager