The challenge: Breaking down silos to make smarter decisions, faster

The ability to share valuable customer information out across a Fortune 500 sized organization is the mark of a company who puts their clients at the center of every decision. But with piles of research and thousands of stakeholders across hundreds of departments, the right technology is necessary to enable efficient, secure, and data-driven socialization.

At Whirlpool, the consumer insights team asked themselves, “how can we connect our business partners more quickly to the insights and answers they need from our customer research so that every decision is backed by data?”.

With the way Whirlpool’s insights team is structured, research is done by region. This makes it difficult for cross functional teams to know what information is available, let alone have access to it when they need to move quickly. Initially, the company tried to use Google Drive to centralize and share all of their research. Problems quickly arose, though, as many files captured in the research process, like raw survey data and video files, weren’t compatible and did not function properly in Google Drive. To truly unlock the power of their research the team needed a solution that could help their business partners find answers from not just reports, but also the underlying survey data and videos captured in each research project.

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Why KnowledgeHound: User friendly solution that combines search and visualization

KnowledgeHound has made it incredibly easy to connect stakeholders from product, marketing, and sales teams to any answer they need from the company’s research. From foundational research, to brand health trackers, and everything in between — KnowledgeHound is Whirlpool’s one-stop-shop. KnowledgeHound helps Whirlpool move smarter and faster with their data due to a few key aspects.

• Data-driven searches and visualization lets Whirlpool’s constituents find the answers they need. Marketing can crosstab survey questions by different ages, genders, etc. to create the stories they need to tell — fast.
• User friendly tool with elements of self service empowers higher adoption rates of the platform throughout cross-functional teams. While the insights team is very quant-minded, other teams are not. The usability of KnowledgeHound makes it so stakeholders are able to search for information in the moment with a Google-like experience.
• An engaged KnowledgeHound customer success team builds relationships with Whirlpool’s suppliers to ensure data quality standards are met and continues to partner with Whirlpool to engage and increase adoption and usage.

In fact, the overall collaboration that comes along with every KnowledgeHound subscription is Whirlpool’s Consumer Insights Manager, Lesley Frake’s, favorite KH asset. “One thing I absolutely love about working with KnowledgeHound is the collaboration”, Lesley says. “It’s not just the customer success team but I have conversations with the product team as well to talk about how they can make KnowledgeHound better. I feel like Whirlpool is integrated into the product roadmap”.