Specialized Bicycles Rides with eGain
Specialized Bicycles, a Northern California-based retailer of premium, electric, and motorized bicycles and cycling apparel and accessories, produces a massive amount of digital content, including product manuals for every bicycle, detailed knowledge articles, and troubleshooting guides.
The company already has published more than 1,200 knowledge articles, with about 5,000 more in the queue for vetting, says Jeannie Saur, the company’s knowledge management and quality leader. “That means thousands of pages of manuals and other materials, and we do this in 22 languages.”
Earlier this year, Specialized Bicycles, which is celebrating its 50th year in business, decided to move from its existing knowledge platform to a cloud platform. “We had all sorts of business risks with our previous platform. Knowledge was disappearing, the website was going down, and we wanted to understand how we were operating.”
Prior to making the transition, the company conducted an in-depth assessment of its content operations, looking at how well it was using its content management system; how well it was using the company website; and how well knowledge roles are defined within the organization. The content maturity evaluations revealed both staffing and platform constraints.
“We knew that we had some challenges with our platform, but this brought into sharp focus where our pain points were. We were exposed to the business risks of our portal going down. We had no single source of truth. We were relying on superhero efforts from our knowledge team, and that’s not sustainable. It’s a great way to burn out your employees. So we knew we needed to make a change,”
After looking at a number of vendors, Specialized Bicycles eventually opted for the eGain Knowledge Hub, which Saur says “had the best alignment for our use cases. The solution offered us a dependable, cloud-based platform that mitigated our business risk.”
Another selling point was the fact that eGain offered guided help, set up templates and workflows, and automated some of the company’s content processes. The artificial intelligence that is embedded in Knowledge Hub has been valuable as well.
“We have a single source of truth, and we’re integrating that in our other systems, like Salesforce Service Cloud,” Saur says. Previously, knowledge workers using Salesforce Service Cloud needed to leave that program to find information and search several different Specialized Bicycles knowledge areas, lengthening average call handling times and eroding confidence in the answers provided.
Now with the eGain Knowledge Hub, Specialized Bicycle employees can access any company knowledge without leaving Salesforce Service Cloud. The AI can even make knowledge recommendations based on the content of the call.
“The content team is really freaking happy,” Saur says. “The eGain Knowledge Hub is unlocking and accelerating our success with the things we used to worry about before, like processes and workflows, templates, and, in particular, analytics. These are all addressed in the platform and using eGain AI.”
The solution is like having additional staff to handle micro-tasks, which are now automated, according to Saur. “We’re building out premium service. We’re building out self-help experiences with the assistance of eGain AI, for everything from bulk import of knowledge to authoring assistance to content insights. But truly the biggest opportunity that we have seen with eGain Knowledge Hub is scaling and maturing our operations.”
As a result, retailers who sell the bicycles are getting faster support when they have issues with one of the bicycles. Any issues can be diagnosed and solved quickly, Saur says. “E-bikes are extremely complicated.”
Going forward, Specialized Bicycles expects to gain additional efficiencies using the eGain Knowledge Hub to build out additional self-help content and guided help for riders.
The Payoff
Since adopting eGain Knowledge Hub, Specialized Bicycles has seen the following results:
- its content maturity score rise from 1.5 on a 4-point scale to 2.0 (emerging), with a goal of achieving a 3.0 score in 2025 and a score of 3.5 or higher through 2026 and 2027;
- its content formatting simplified; and
- its content standardized across all platforms.
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