Success Story
Keeping Employees Effective & Accountable
How do you share your company's best practices in a way that makes them easy for everyone to access?
Challenges
JJ Buckley is a mid-sized e-commerce business and a leader in fine wine sales. The company needed to resolve a problem: its sales team and its operations team were having trouble working in coordination.
Day-to-day processes were manageable. However, some customer issues occurred rarely enough that the sales team didn't know the best practices for resolving them. Their solutions often required the operations team to "move mountains" to make possible.
Xavier's Approach
JJ Buckley hired me to update the company's business process documentation. I began by holding interviews with leadership and members of both the sales and operations team. My goal was to learn about the dynamic between the two groups.
Through these conversations, I learned that employees had already detailed best practices and developed standard operating procedures. However, no one person had access to all of the information he or she might need; instead, the details were stored in:
A lengthy document covering job-related tasks.
A collection of emails dating back several years.
Exit documents from professionals who had left the company.
By reviewing these sources, I determined that, while the company had a good deal of its process documented, some of the information was outdated, and the company lacked an effective way of sharing this information.
Solutions
I worked with JJ Buckley's sales and operations leadership to sort, update, and consolidate these various documents. Then, I created an internal website for the company, which we named the "Knowledge Base."
The Knowledge Base is a central source of information with a searchable and user-friendly interface. It addresses a wide array of common sales issues, from engaging new customers to processing bulk order shipments to tracking new product imports.
The website standardizes work, enables easy sharing of the current processes, and allows the sales team to do its job more effectively. It also streamlines communication between sales and operations. As a result, JJ Buckley is able to work more efficiently and with greater trust between the departments.
Built 3
department-specific sites to improve company information sharing
56 employees
leveraging the company Knowledge Base
"Xavier is exactly what a growing organization needs. He understands how processes and procedures generate growth and profits. He was able to go into each department of our company, connect with people, and help them turn their daily to-do lists into a real system, fixing some things that were very broken. Thank you, Xavier!"
Michael Stajer, COO, JJ Buckley