The Challenge

Ineffective and inconsistent internal documentation lowered employee productivity and frustrated subject matter experts.

With clients across eight industries and a highly complex product, effective internal documentation is critical to onboarding and enabling employees at Shift4—especially client-facing employees. Subject matter experts at Shift4 developed thousands of long-winded troubleshooting docs and agent scripts in Microsoft Word documents. These static articles were ineffective because they contained an overwhelming amount of information that did not adapt to the needs of each employee. It was frustrating and time-consuming for employees and internal subject matter experts to find and update the documentation, contributing to high employee turnover and low productivity.

On top of that, department heads struggled to manage the circulation of internal documentation throughout the company, often resulting in employees reading outdated or sensitive documentation. Inconsistent documentation caused many employees to inadvertently be non-compliant when dealing with complex product situations and detailed processes. And even worse, employees were emailing Word documents, which was not a secure way to share documentation that could contain confidential information. 

Shift4 needed internal documentation that would effectively guide employees when and where they needed help, could easily be kept consistent and up-to-date, and provided role-based access control (RBAC).

The Solution

An easy-to-manage knowledge platform that effectively delivers adaptive guidance across the organization.

Brian Lauber, director of operations at Shift4, took the lead on finding a better solution and chose to partner with Stonly.

Over 2,500+ employees find the specific answers they need with two easy-to-search, RBAC Stonly Knowledge Bases, which now serve as a centralized location for subject matter experts and employees to write, update, and download internal documentation. One knowledge base contains new hire onboarding and every team’s documentation, including IT, support, accounting, and marketing. The second knowledge base is for client-facing teams and contains support agent guides and scripts.

Shift4 has 1000+ interactive Stony guides within their knowledge bases that effectively help employees find the most relevant answers or help they’re looking for with adaptive steps based on their situation and role. Or for those who already know what they are looking for, each guide contains a table of contents view so employees can jump straight to relevant content. Stonly guides also help onboard new team members with materials customized to their individual and team-based needs.

All collaboration within Stonly is kept consistent and secure via single-sign-on (SSO) to ensure all collaborators create, update, and maintain documentation in a single location. All Shift4 documentation can now be accessed by employees using a single, unchanging URL. Stonly is SOC 2 certified, cyber-risk insured, and GDPR compliant.

The Results

Launched 1,000+ Stonly guides in six months to provide employees with the precise information they need while opening subject matter expert bandwidth for new projects.

In just six months, Shift4 was able to migrate 1,000+ internal articles from Word documents to Stonly knowledge bases and guides. The step-by-step, adaptive format encourages their entire workforce to leverage the documentation for help and training more frequently. New hires are delighted with the faster, more dynamic onboarding process that adapts to their learning style, role, and experience level.

Brian noted:

“We have had the most success by having process flows in Stonly that keep employees from skipping or missing crucial steps. Stonly allows creativity in the procedure creation phase and encourages procedural compliance in the execution phase.”

Shift4’s 50-60 subject matter experts now use folders and tags to make their complex creation and approval process faster and more efficient. This gives them more time to build out their fully branded, client-facing knowledge base to deflect incoming tickets and, eventually, better onboard clients.

Stonly Insights help subject matter experts continuously improve their content at scale. With the ability to track guide interactions, the team can better understand each employee’s journey and learn what works and could be improved. 

Working with Stonly

During onboarding, the Stonly customer success team (CS) worked closely with Shift4 to train their administrators and content creators on the best practices for using the platform to achieve their goals. To help Shift4’s team become experts in using Stonly, the CS team ran a series of personalized training sessions on how to get the most out of Stonly’s key features. 

Even after the initial onboarding stage, the Stonly team regularly collaborates with Shift4 to build precisely what they need to succeed. Recent features Stonly and Shift4 collaborated on include folder-level permissions, knowledge base search customization, and a table of contents for each guide. Whenever product improvements or bug fixes are requested, Stonly is fast to ship them due to the team’s flexibility and agility to prioritize and improve our product based on customer needs. As Stonly builds new features, the CS team sends regular progress updates to Shift4 so they always have the latest information.