Business Background

Mark-Taylor Companies is a leading developer, owner, and investment manager of luxury multifamily communities in Arizona and Nevada. Established in 1985, the company is one of the region’s oldest standing managers and owner of Class A multifamily real estate on behalf of numerous third-party owners. The company has around 750 people spread across multiple locations in the region.

Business Requirement

Mark-Taylor was looking for a neat and simple platform to digitize all their standard operating procedures (SOPs) and information to help different roles, such as customer service, technical operations, and maintenance staff, do their jobs better. The SOPs cover end-to-end procedures, from day-to-day maintenance of the communities to even operating a golf cart.

Mark-Taylor began the process of putting up their standard operating procedures online by creating PDFs of them and uploading them on Microsoft SharePoint. However, they faced multiple difficulties:

• The platform was cumbersome. Every time a change needed to be made, they had to edit and reupload the entire document.
• The information was difficult to navigate for people who wanted to browse and find the information they required or simply understand the information at hand.
• The search functionality was not satisfactory, resulting in low user adoption.
• The platform was not aesthetically pleasing.

This resulted in Mark-Taylor wanting to identify an online knowledge management platform that made the SOPs look neatly organized, was easy to navigate, and made updating information a seamless process.

Business Solution

After an in-depth evaluation of a few knowledge management platforms in the market, Mark-Taylor decided to host their private online knowledge base on Document360. The knowledge base, which they call “Blueprint” to align with their buildings theme, is made accessible to all their 750-odd employees spread across 20 locations.

• The intuitive user interface made the platform clean and easy to navigate.
• The categories tab on the left, which can go three layers deep, helped organize the information in a manner that it can be navigated easily.
• Content can also be reorganized easily with just a drag and drop, and updated in a few seconds.
• Easy to give access to an unlimited number of people.
• Articles that have been updated, corrected, or newly updated are flagged as “new” so visitors are quickly informed.
• Review reminder helps them mark extremely popular articles, that need to be visited or updated every couple of weeks so they don’t become outdated.
• The workflow feature helps their single-member authoring team coordinate with subject matter experts to proofread their content before it is published.
• The notes tab on the side allows subject matter experts mark out all changes and suggestions while ensuring the original draft can only be edited by the content management team.
• The customization options helped the content management team insert a button that users can click to leave feedback. The feedback is directed to the subject matter expert rather than the content management team because they would know the information better.
• The homepage builder helped them personalize their knowledge base in terms of colors, fonts, etc.
• Customer support was extremely responsive when the Mark Taylor team faced any issues.
• The analytics provided give them in-depth details on articles most visited, who has visited their platform, keywords most searched, etc, which helps continually enhance their content.

Shelene Romane, Associate Director of Brand & People Excellence at Mark Taylor says,

The analytics provided give us clear insights on topics to prioritize when creating new content or updating the knowledge base.

Business Impact

The new private knowledge base has enabled Mark-Taylor to give access to every employee who joins the company on their very first day, so they can refer to it and acquire the information they need. As a result, the knowledge base has transformed into an effective onboarding tool.

Most employees have expressed relief at being able to finally access all their SOPs easily online, 24/7. The analytics show a gradual increase in platform adoption by employees, making it a success.

Shelene Romane, Associate Director of Brand & People Excellence, Mark Taylor says,

Document360 is an engaging platform, easy to use and has highly responsive customer support.

Conclusion

For a large enterprise company like Mark-Taylor, which is growing at a brisk pace and is particular about ensuring that growth is seamless and all procedures are followed uniformly across multiple sites, Document360 was a perfect tool to help in onboarding, training, and assisting their employees in achieving the above.