ZenMarket is an international e-commerce company focusing on proxy purchasing services. They help their clients shop on Japanese ecommerce sites, consolidate their purchases at the warehouse and then ship to their desired destination.
Fast growing customer support team working remotely - need a way to share changes and onboard new teammates efficiently
ZenMarket has around 80 full-time staff onsite and 270 part-time workers and independent contractors. Their major operation is stationed in Osaka, Japan with IT and customer support staff working remotely from other countries.
As a fast growing company, they constantly change the way they do things. It is difficult for teammates to keep up with the why, how and when without an efficient knowledge sharing process. They used to share these changes via Slack communication, but as they have new teammates joining them every day, it would have been unrealistic to expect that they all would read the manuals and be aware of the changes that might have been shared via Slack prior to their arrival to the company.
And with many customer support staff working overseas, they need a way that can help them train up support reps remotely as well. Prior to using Kipwise, they dealt with it by either sending them a Microsoft office document (which they never managed to keep up-to-date), or sharing a Google Document (which made it easy to update, however sharing it with multiple people outside their G-suite raised several security questions).
The previous documentation tool they used does not offer good multilingual search
Prior to using Kipwise, they used Bitrix24 for a couple years. It is a complex tool for multiple things - documentation is one of them, but it can also be used for task tracking, presence tracking, CRM and many other functions. However, ZenMarket did not use many of these functions (as they are using another more specialized tool for task management), so using Bitrix24 has become a waste.
They also feel that information structuring was counterintuitive in that tool and, the biggest issue of all, was that searching in Japanese did not work, which made documenting anything in it pretty pointless as they operate in at least two languages - English and Japanese.
With the above pain points, they knew they had to find another tool to better document their internal knowledge.
Why ZenMarket chose Kipwise as their solution
Olga Pokrovska, Operations Manager at ZenMarket, researched a number of solutions and decided to choose Kipwise because of the major reasons below:
Multilingual search
As mentioned earlier, ZenMarket has content in both English and Japanese. Olga considered many other options during the buying process but most of them do not support multilingual search. Although Bitrix24 (the tool that they used prior to using Kipwise) offers Japanese interface, the search did not actually work for Japanese. So Olga is really impressed by how great the search is for Japanese content on Kipwise.
Powerful Slack integration
ZenMarket team relies heavily on Slack, especially for communicating with their remote workers from overseas. Being able to access team knowledge directly within Slack is therefore extremely useful for them. They also like how our Slack login also works for single channel guests, so they can access Kipwise easily without having to store one more account login information.
Permission control with user groups
ZenMarket has different teams in different locations that need access to different information. With Kipwise, they can easily control which content should be shared company-wide and which ones should only be shared with a certain team by setting permissions based on user groups. And keeping information on Kipwise also adds security to their content to make sure it is not accessible everywhere on the Internet.
Very fast and responsive customer support
As customer support professionals themselves, Olga also commented that our very fast and responsive customer support makes them feel special and that they know they always have someone to count on if they need help on using the product.
Kipwise helps to reduce managers’ burden by reducing the number of repeated questions
One positive change that ZenMarket observed after using Kipwise is that their teammates all agree that it is convenient to have a centralized source of information without needing to ask their superior every time. As the team continues to grow, it’s hard for managers to respond to teammates’ questions one by one. So now when an issue arises, Olga always tries to turn it into a Kipwise article, so that when it arises again, other teammates can always just refer back to the article.
Kipwise helps them keep their content up-to-date with automatic reminders
Olga also likes how Kipwise has a built-in content review flow where our system will automatically remind the content creators to check and update the content in regular intervals. It’s always easy to create new content, but keeping them up-to-date can be a challenge as it’s just too easy to sweep under the rug. So the regular reminders from Kipwise are really useful for them.
Building up a search-first culture in the team
Olga commented that it is useless to have a knowledge base if you do not fill it with content and encourage people to really use it. So you need to build a culture of “look for it first” and “here is the information we have” within the company. At customer support, they try to incorporate Kipwise in onboarding and staff education as much as possible, and their Admin department also tries to keep necessary information updated and direct people to it whenever necessary.
Kipwise also offers built-in features to help teams build up a search-first culture. Check out our blog post Turn Kipwise to the Google for your team - How to build a search-first culture in the team for more tips.
