The Way We Work Has Changed, and Our Customers Are Evidence of That

Back in March of 2015, we wrote about how the way we work is changing. Most of us spend our entire day in our web browsers, with multiple tabs open for the various SaaS apps we use to do our jobs. As a result, traditional knowledge portals like wikis have seen their adoption plummet because leaving our workflow to find information negatively impacts our productivity and ability to do our jobs. That's why we first started Guru by building a browser extension to give your team access to information everywhere on the web.

"What really made Guru stand out to me when evaluating it, was the ability to take your company’s knowledge everywhere: put it in Slack or in the browser extension that followed me around the web. The ability to consume knowledge was much higher than any product I evaluated or used before." - Ben MacAskill, VP of Operations, Smugmug

Since that post, we've seen another fundamental shift in the way we work: the rise of messaging apps like Slack. Slack has increasingly become your team’s hub for communication and notifications so it only makes sense for Guru to live there as well. We built our Slack bot in 2016 to easily allow you to capture, search, and distribute knowledge directly in the app. Our bot is now being used by over 85% of our customers including companies like Shopify, Square, Intercom, Dell Boomi, Greenhouse and Optimizely.

"We are huge users of Slack on the Greenhouse team. Internal conversations happen here all day long. Having Guru + Slack ensures we have a highly streamlined workflow with Guru ensuring all our knowledge lives right where conversations are taking place!" - Victoria Moss, Director of Sales Operations, Greenhouse

Now, Guru has grown to over 300 paying customers, all of whom have replaced their legacy knowledge portals with a simple, flexible, and accessible knowledge management solution that is the single source of truth for your company's knowledge. With this growth, we're happy to announce our recent $9.3M Series A round of funding led by Emergence Capital, with participation from previous investors FirstMark Capital and MSD Capital, Michael Dell’s personal investment fund. We’ll be using the funding to continue building our team and further invest in machine-learning capabilities to help coach your teams in real-time based on the context they are working in.

Knowledge Everywhere You Need It

As companies grow, the way they institutionalize company knowledge needs to change. Teams naturally get siloed, and more and more software is purchased to support the ongoing efforts of the organization. In each one of these applications, people need knowledge. Some examples include:

• CRM
• Ticketing System
• Live Chat
• Email
• Marketing Automation
• LinkedIn

Guru’s mission is to solve a knowledge management problem in a way that supports the way modern teams work and improves their productivity. Particularly for your customer facing teams like sales, customer success, and support, we know that the speed, relevance, and accuracy of your response directly impacts revenue.On the support side, we live in an omnichannel world and customer’s expectation for stellar support has never been higher. Agents need quick access to knowledge for every channel you support. Live chat in particular is quickly becoming the preferred channel of choice with customers which makes the speed and accuracy of response a key differentiator on NPS and CSAT scores. Customers like Intercom have seen a 60% reduction in time to first response after implementing Guru.

"A key challenge for our team was having no centralized source of truth for information. As a result, experts on our team were getting the same questions asked of them in Slack over and over again. Since adopting Guru, our first response time has reduced by 60% and we're seeing a 34% reduction in repeat questions in Slack." - Anita Pericic, Support Operations, Intercom

On the sales side, buyers are more sophisticated and informed than ever. As sales becomes more consultative in nature, reps that can educate their prospects and add value in every interaction will win more deals. Yet, according to Sirius Decisions, 71% of sales reps said their lack of knowledge was the reason they could not close deals. Providing accurate knowledge to your reps in their workflow can decrease sales cycle times and help your team close more deals.

"Guru is the connective tissue between my SE team and the rest of our GTM organization, and the ultimate force multiplier for Optimizely. It is the easiest way to capture the expertise of my team and scale that expertise across the global sales and success organizations." - Zach Lawryk, Senior Director of Solutions Engineering, Optimizely

As workflows get more and more complex, we aim to minimize the context switching that can cost people up to 40% of their productivity. Between the web application, browser extension, and Slack bot, our customers are able to access the knowledge they need to be successful.

"What sold me on Guru was how it's embedded into a support agent's workflow. Unlike our previous solution, our agents don’t have to switch tabs or go anywhere to find the information they need.The results have been a 5x lift in the amount our knowledge was utilized while responding to customers. Our handle time has improved, and I’m more confident that the knowledge conveyed to customers is accurate and up-to-date." -Dana Tessier, Director of Knowledge Management, Shopify

What's next for Guru

Traditional knowledge management systems weren’t designed to solve modern-day business problems -- they were simply a basic way to store and access content. Companies now need solutions that fit into modern workflows, and enable teams to collaborate internally and externally as quickly and confidently as possible.

But that's just the beginning. We believe that the knowledge you need to do your job should find you, when and where you need it. By being where our customers work, we have a unique opportunity to leverage machine learning to coach our customers to do their jobs better and faster. Imagine being a new support agent and instantly getting access to the prior learnings of your entire support organization, in context. Or being a salesperson and real-time coaching on product knowledge honed from interacting with similar customers in the past. These are just a few of the types of innovations we are so excited to continue building with our next round of funding.

If our mission and vision excites you, we would love to chat! We have lots of opportunities open in engineering, sales, and more in both Philadelphia and San Francisco.