Q & A with Karen Kraft, Associate Director of Consumer Insights & Analytics, Johnsonville
What are some of the current pain points that you were looking for Capacity’s Answer Engine® to alleviate?
We initially hired Capacity’s Answer Engine to help us more effectively access insights across our company. As our General Manager of US Retail says, “We know more about sausage than anyone, we just need to make sure we’re using all of that knowledge.” We have a large amount of valuable knowledge across our internal shared drives and our third-party subscriptions, but these systems are vast, organized differently by department and spread out across the organization. It understandably takes a considerable amount of time for employees to track down the insights they need in the moment to make sure we’re living The Johnsonville Way and delighting our customers and consumers. When they can’t find something, they either ask a colleague for help, which distracts both people from the work at hand, or recreate the resource.
The Answer Engine acts as a 24/7 subject matter expert for our team. It answers employees’ questions in real time and gets them the exact resources they need to drive their work forward. The faster information discovery Answer Engine enables will improve our team’s productivity and decision-making. If employees need something, they ask our Answer Engine.
How does the Answer Engine® benefit you in ways that previous investments have not?
We chose to implement the Answer Engine because it is an AI-powered knowledge management solution. From an IT security standpoint, we weren’t comfortable with other technologies that are out there that require significant manual uploading of files, organizing, and data and server cleaning and upkeep. We’d recently walked away from one of those types of solutions. With Capacity’s Answer Engine, we simply gave it access to our systems and it was able to start answering employee’s questions right away.
Change management for our team was also a factor. We knew that we needed to make adoption easy, or employees wouldn’t leverage the platform. The last thing we wanted was a complicated system that folks would be resistant to learning. We saw through the demos how easy it was to interact with it and how quickly it answered questions. Employees could ask questions and get answers directly in our company’s business messaging platform. Knowing the Answer Engine would be easy to use and adopt was key.
There’s a night and day difference in how we access company information with Capacity’s Answer Engine. It gives us one access point to the insights that live across all of our different sources, and thanks to connections with RSS feeds, some we may not have even downloaded yet. When we ask a question or need something, it instantly scans our entire corporate knowledge ecosystem and surfaces the information, taking us to the specific page, slide, or video time stamp in which the answer we need lives. It also helps us find new content that we didn’t know existed that is related to our original question and gives us additional context. We’re finally confident that we are indeed using all of the sausage knowledge that we have.
Can you share which platforms it’s integrating with?
We’ve integrated the Answer Engine with our Microsoft SharePoint, Teams, industry information that is published online daily, and vendor RSS feeds. We can ask questions in a private chat or mention her in a group chat within Teams – either on desktop or mobile – and get an immediate and summarized answer to our questions based on the information across our SharePoint and Teams files. We also use the webpage often as it is easy to navigate and scroll through all of the sources it provides when we ask her a question.
How quickly did you realize the benefits?
We saw value in the first month of using the Answer Engine. It was proven to be an invaluable asset to our team in just seven months. Initially, we rolled her out to the consumer, customer and product insights team. Within those first few days she was already saving us time as we could easily access needed information owned by the other teams without wasting their valuable time. Both marketing and innovation managers now turn to it for answers to their questions first before asking a colleague. Recently, we introduced the Answer Engine to the sales team and they are finding valuable insights to help them provide added value to their customers. This gives traditional subject matter experts more time to focus on tackling more complex and high-impact business challenges and projects.
An excellent illustration of Capacity’s Answer Engine capabilities was evident during a cross-functional meeting, where a question was posed that would have normally required asking a member of the insights team that wasn’t in the meeting. One of the other Answer Engine-using team members from a different department that was in the meeting, asked it a question and was instantly able to supply the information the team needed in the meeting to continue a productive discussion. Others in the meeting were blown away by how fast they got the critical answer they needed. That story has gone a bit viral within Johnsonville, and we already have other departments asking how they could potentially utilize Answer Engine’s knowledge sharing power with their information.
As more employees use it across the organization, we have seen a noticeable rise in more confident and faster decision making, considerable time savings, and less subject matter expert guilt. Thanks to the Answer Engine, we’ve been able to enjoy our summer vacations with fewer emergency texts of where can I find/would you please send me this information? Recently while visiting old friends out-of-state, I received one of those texts and was easily able to suggest a question they could ask the Answer Engine and they were able to find the exact information they needed. Meanwhile, I was able to go back to enjoying my vacation immediately without anyone noticing I had helped out someone at work.
Which business function do you expect to experience the most significant benefits? Any plans to expand it?
We anticipate that all business functions within Johnsonville that use it will experience significant benefits. So far, we’ve rolled it out across our consumer, customer, product insights, brand marketing, innovation, and sales teams across the country.
As it continues to demonstrate value and success, we will explore expanded implementation to other departments and functions within our organization. For example, after hearing about Answer Engine via that viral story, our product development team recently asked for me to help them explore how they could potentially use it to help them share knowledge now and in the future across their team members.
