SmartBug Media is an inbound marketing agency that specializes in HubSpot and Marketo. The company helps clients achieve their marketing and sales goals through content creation, digital media, and paid media.
A key differentiator for SmartBug is its series of comprehensive processes, which the team has developed over years of in-depth work with clients to consistently provide the highest quality service to every client. In fact, SmartBug’s processes work so well that they’ve climbed the rankings to be HubSpot’s #1 rated inbound marketing agency.
To apply these world-class processes uniformly, it’s critical that SmartBug can share institutional knowledge easily across the entire organization.
The Problem
The SmartBug team knew it was essential to have an easily accessible central repository of shared knowledge. Its system, however, wasn’t working.
“Everything we had documented was inside of Google Docs,” explains Jessica Vionas-Singer, Director of Inbound Marketing at SmartBug. “We had a lot of information there, but we couldn’t find it.”
Searching for and locating relevant information and necessary documents inside Google Docs was a challenge. Moreover, managing permissions and access was difficult.
“You never really knew what was out there,” says Jessica. “You had an idea that something might exist, but finding it was usually quite difficult. That was what we were trying to combat.”
The Solution
SmartBug needed an internal knowledge base that was easily searchable, shareable, and accessible for all employees across the organization. The team piloted a number of tools and ultimately selected Tettra.
SmartBug migrated its entire library of Google Docs over to Tettra and ensured all links were contained within the Tettra environment. SmartBug worked closely with Tettra to ensure the new knowledge base was complete, up-to-date, and reflective of a single source of truth for each document that lived inside it. Upon launch, Tettra was quickly well-received.
“When we rolled [Tettra] out, the company took to it like fish to water,” says Jessica. “It’s such an intuitive tool that people immediately just started using it. They started asking questions, making suggestions, making new Tettra articles when it made sense within their department. Within two weeks, everybody was using it.”
With Tettra, employees can now quickly and easily access internal information—from Q&A resources to explainer articles to embedded videos. Instead of struggling to find relevant documents, team members can use Tettra’s search functionality to find exactly what they’re looking for within seconds.
“Partnering with Tettra has enabled our Onboarding Team, our Client Services team, and all of our other departments to get on the same page, to document our processes, to remove friction from finding information [they] need,” says Jessica.
“Tettra has taken our shared knowledge to the next level. Honestly, I can’t imagine trying to replicate what we’ve done with Tettra in any other way.”
The Results
The SmartBug culture has always celebrated knowledge-sharing. “When a new employee comes in, people just jump in to help all the time,” says Jessica. “People will send out questions, and somebody else will jump in.” Tettra has supported and reinforced that culture. That has been particularly helpful as SmartBug’s team has recently grown.
“[Knowledge-sharing] on a one-on-one kind of basis isn’t as easy once you get to be a bigger company,” says Jessica. “Tettra helps us do that on a broader level.”
Tettra has facilitated the dissemination of internal knowledge, and it’s also helped reinforce a standardized approach to client services. “Tettra has really enabled the Client Services team to take our processes and make sure that we’re all on the same page,” says Jessica. “Right now, we’re trying to roll that out across the other organizations inside of our company as well.” Tettra helps SmartBug interact cross-departmentally, because it’s so easy to see how other departments are working.
Having a central repository for knowledge has been instrumental in helping Tettra onboard new employees, refine processes, and standardize systems across the organization. It has also had a positive impact on staff time, as using Tettra has enabled team members to find and use information more quickly.
Ultimately, that easy access to information benefits the client. “The client is getting a quality product every time,” explains Jessica. “You don’t have a Client Services team member who’s trying to figure out how to do something for the first time. You have this repository of knowledge where someone’s done it before. And if they’ve documented it, you have that as a roadmap to go off of.”
Such a repository of knowledge benefits the client and relieves stress and frustration for SmartBug employees. “There’s also a component of staff satisfaction,” says Jessica. “If you’re adding friction points and difficult processes that are not enabling your staff to do a good job, that ultimately can be one component in attrition.”
The Takeaway
Jessica and her team couldn’t be happier that they partnered with Tettra to create a user-friendly, intuitive, and easily-searchable internal knowledge base.
“I would recommend Tettra to any organization looking to centralize knowledge and consistently perform processes or procedures across an organization, whether that’s a 10-person company, a 100-person company, or a 3,000-person company.”
In any company where knowledge-sharing is crucial—and is there a company where that isn’t the case?—Tettra can be the solution that saves time, relieves stress, promotes shared values and information, and benefits the end customer.