The Challenge

Maintaining internal documentation to support 5,000 employees was time-consuming and inconsistent.

Deploying new processes and software is incredibly challenging for large enterprises, but the challenge is even more significant for banks, given their stringent compliance and security requirements.

Bpifrance faced the formidable challenge of providing continuous training to its 5,000 employees, covering over 300 solutions on complex finance topics, such as loans. The organization’s employees require expert guidance to navigate intricate processes related to client management, compliance with regulatory mandates, and execution of their roles.

To overcome these challenges, the bank leverages the expertise of its digital transformation department, comprised of 500 product, technology, and business specialists. However, these experts struggled to maintain the relevance and accuracy of their long and detailed internal PDFs, which served as critical employee training resources.

Non-technical clients require extensive support to use complex solutions.

Bpifrance serves its SMB clients with multiple products, including its two main solutions: a front-to-back banking platform to finance and support SMBs and a full digital lending offer for very small businesses. Onboarding clients and providing contextual guidance on these intricate solutions posed a significant challenge for the company. Non-financial professionals needed help understanding complex financial jargon and required extensive assistance to complete forms and setup.

To address this challenge, Bpifrance sought a more effective approach to onboard and guide its clients. The organization recognized the need to offer comprehensive assistance that caters to the unique needs of its clients. Additionally, the company sought a reliable way to communicate new features and announcements to clients, providing them with up-to-date information and a seamless experience.

In action: COVID-19 loans spark urgency for accelerated employee guidance.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic left businesses across the globe struggling to keep their doors open. Bpifrance was tasked with granting digital loans to support small businesses that were ineligible for the PGE (Prêts Garanti par l'État) public loans in just a couple of days. This required their product experts to quickly deploy documentation about business changes throughout the organization and directly in the products to push helpful guidance before any problem occurred.

With time of the essence, Bpifrance faced the daunting task of educating its 1,500 employees across 50 branches to launch the new loan initiative and respond to the surge of client service requests. The company recognized the limitations of its existing PDF-based training resources and sought a faster and more effective solution.

Moreover, given the rapidly changing regulations, Bpifrance had to ensure the security and consistency of their solution while providing the flexibility to update information swiftly. The bank required a highly-secure solution that would allow them to maintain standardized employee guidance across all branches.

Solution

An employee knowledge and customer service platform that provides consistent, adaptive guidance across solutions and processes.

Bpifrance continuously improves employee productivity and helps clients faster with Stonly’s interactive, step-by-step guidance platform. Using a single adaptive platform for employees and clients allows Bpifrance to consistently disseminate messaging to reflect constantly changing regulations while maintaining client trust.

Employee Knowledge Sharing and Performance

Today, over 500 product experts create and share information across departments through internal knowledge bases. Additionally, Stonly’s versioning and rights management capabilities allow teams to track updates and specify who can change content to maintain efficiency, accuracy, and collaboration.

Within those knowledge bases, step-by-step, adaptive guides enable employees to follow the right processes and find the exact information they need to help clients. This format allows employees to speak with clients about their complex solutions as if they were experts by breaking help content down into steps that adapt to the client’s requests to provide the most relevant solution based on their situation and persona.

All content created within the Stonly is saved in a single secure location that only employees can access, update, and maintain. This ensures that information is shared consistently and securely via a single source of truth across departments.

Using Stonly’s integrations, Bpifrance can guide employees in the right place, at the right time in the context of the tools they use for their day-to-day work. Employees can access their internal help content without opening another browser tab. For example, Bpifrance’s client service teams use step-by-step guides as scripts in their Zendesk ticket. Furthermore, checklists help the organization track and maintain compliance.

Client Self-Service and Satisfaction

Bpifrance enables more clients to self-solve with help centers that contain client-facing versions of Stonly’s interactive, step-by-step guides. Beyond these help centers, the company guides clients through every step of their journey, even on its website and within its solutions, by:

• Communicating and sharing time-sensitive information through banners.
• Explaining new features and specific pricing details using hotspots.
• Effectively onboarding new clients by launching guided tours and tooltips.
• Providing contextual support everywhere it matters with a help prompt.

In action: Rapid deployment of an internal knowledge base to aid employees in serving clients during the COVID-19 loan spike.

During COVID-19, Bpifrance deployed a highly secure internal knowledge base in just a couple of days. This enabled employees to quickly access and find the precise information they needed to help clients. Amidst continually changing COVID-19 loan processes, Stonly’s no-code interface made it easy for Bpifrance’s product experts to update content in real-time without interrupting the sales team’s workflows.

As the most effective format for help content, the knowledge base incorporated Stonly’s interactive step-by-step guides to make complex loan information less overwhelming to sales employees. These pathed guides offer choices so employees can follow the right path to help their clients. With Stonly’s Zendesk integration, Bpifrance could make these loan guides available right in the tool employees were using to help clients.

Results

Proactive, contextual guidance for employees and clients produces 2X faster response times and prevents 50% of tickets.

“We’re continuing to expand the use of Stonly internally and externally, with over 5,000 product experts and employees using the platform for consistent one-to-many guidance. With Stonly as our always up-to-date source of truth, client-facing teams can respond twice as fast and more accurately. We enjoy working with Stonly’s team but hardly ever need to because their platform is so intuitive! In zero lines of code, we immediately personalize our end users’ in-app experience. That way, clients contact customer service less often, reducing incoming tickets by half for key issues covered by Stonly.”

~Thomas Thieffry, Head of Product

Product experts can instantly publish and update documentation, saving hours each time. As a result, Bpifrance’s 30+ product teams, customer service, and business teams have gained considerable autonomy. They can easily add or update content to keep up with changing regulations, skipping the unnecessary technical barriers posed by overly-complex tools.

Client-facing employee responses are twice as fast and more consistent with Stonly’s adaptable resource formats that are available when and where teams need guidance. With minimal training, every employee can be an expert on Bpifrance’s solutions, processes, and more.

Situations addressed with Stonly get less than half of the tickets as they would otherwise. With Stonly’s proactive self-serve support solutions, Bpifrance’s clients successfully self-solve their issues before they arise.

In action: Launched a Stonly knowledge base in 2 days to support the COVID-19 loan initiative.

In only a couple of days, Bpifrance was able to securely launch Stonly guides to help 1,500 sales employees handle the influx of client requests from their new loan initiative. This was one of the fastest deployments Bpifrance has ever experienced.

Working with Stonly

Stonly’s white-glove service and personalized onboarding helped train Bpifrance’s product experts to quickly disseminate consistent messaging at scale during the COVID-19 loans initiative. With barely any training or ramp-up time required and access to 24/7 on-demand guidance, the platform empowered Bpifrance to impactfully use tools, maintain procedural compliance, and improve productivity. After quickly training a few product experts, Stonly’s intuitiveness allowed Bpifrance to scale the solution across other business units.

Today, Stonly is so ingrained within the organizations’ workflows that when a problem presents itself, teams first ask if it can be resolved with a Stonly guide.