As the Covid-19 pandemic spread globally, the demand for Rensair’s hospital-grade air purification system surged. However, the company faced significant challenges in meeting this demand due to the severe capacity squeeze experienced by shippers and carriers. Rensair needed to maintain visibility on their supply chain and adopt a proactive problem-solving approach to continue delivering to customers. The situation was further complicated by the closure of borders, which severely restricted travel and transportation, impacting logistics costs and lead times. The company was being approached by various sectors, including schools and construction sites, that remained operational during the pandemic and needed to ensure safety. Rensair was also dealing with international shipping during the worst times, relying on flying in all their goods from Asia, which was both expensive and unsustainable.

Santa Cruz Bicycles, a high-end mountain bike manufacturer based in California, faced significant challenges in managing its procurement timeline to align with its manufacturing schedule. The company sources parts from over 100 suppliers worldwide, and struggled to receive timely updates on the status of parts in transit. This lack of visibility made it difficult to keep their team aligned and meet launch schedules. Angela Jensen and her fellow buyers, part of the procurement team at Santa Cruz Bicycles, were responsible for purchasing parts from 150 global suppliers to support the assembly of their bikes in their California facility. In addition to procurement, much of their time was also spent ensuring the timely arrival of the many moving components of Santa Cruz’s supply chain.

Sika Deutschland, a leading supplier of industrial adhesives, faced significant challenges in managing freight operations at their Rosendahl site. The two primary concerns were freight rates and punctuality, both of which were crucial to meet customer requirements. As a heavyweight in the construction chemicals sector, Sika Deutschland had to ship low-price raw materials like sand, cement, and gypsum around the world, which often posed logistical challenges. Freight accounted for a high share of their total costs due to the heavy yet low-value nature of their products, making their operations extremely price-sensitive. The company needed to transport goods as cheaply as possible without compromising on delivery schedules. Any failure to meet delivery dates resulted in additional costs and operational turmoil. Sika Deutschland was also in need of a freight-forwarding partner for the US market that understood the regional requirements and could provide real-time updates on shipment status.

Solé Bicycles, a Venice Beach-based bike retailer, was facing complexities in its finances and supply chain due to the growing demand for its products. The traditional supply chain payment flows were causing working capital constraints, forcing the company to make tough trade-offs and limiting its ability to invest in growth. The company's President, Jimmy Standley, was managing Solé’s global network of manufacturers and was finding it difficult to build relationships with multiple forwarders. The process was time-consuming, lacked transparency, and was primarily managed over spreadsheets and emails.

Victoria Plum, a UK-based bathroom eCommerce brand, faced significant challenges in managing its diverse and large supply chain amidst the global disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The company's operation involves multiple manufacturers, each with unique supply chain challenges, making the process of ensuring simultaneous manufacturing, shipping, and delivery of a range of bathroom items to customers quite complex. The goal was to provide a seamless experience to customers with one order and one delivery, irrespective of the multiple factories and locations the goods were coming from. However, as global ocean capacity dropped in early 2020, ensuring equipment was available and in the right place became a challenge for Victoria Plum. The company also faced difficulties in meeting transit times, avoiding stock shortages, and ensuring order accuracy.

Vitruvi, a wellness company specializing in essential oil products, faced significant challenges in managing its supply chain as it experienced a rapid growth rate of 900% over four years. The company's flagship product, a high-end stone and ceramic diffuser, was in high demand, leading to production and shipping bottlenecks. The long production lead times resulted in significant delays in delivering the diffusers from Taiwan to customers, forcing Vitruvi to rely on expensive air freight. Additionally, a large portion of the company's working capital was tied up in manufacturing and shipping. The company was at a crossroads, needing to either seek help from a traditional lender or dilute its equity by pursuing a funding round.

Whitmor, a large private company specializing in home organizational products, was facing challenges in managing its supply chain. For many years, the company relied on a traditional freight forwarder and managed its supply chain through spreadsheets and email invoices. This approach made it difficult for the company to conduct financial analysis or make decisions based on historical data. With over 5,500 SKUs and 40+ suppliers, the lack of visibility and data was a significant issue. Whitmor had to entrust key supply chain decisions to its suppliers and logistics providers due to this lack of information. The company was seeking a way to gain better control over its supply chain and turn it into a strategic asset and competitive advantage.

Code&Quill, a Texas-based company that produces creative notebooks, faced a significant challenge in managing their freight logistics. After a successful Kickstarter campaign, the company had to ship goods to nearly 1,200 backers. However, the freight industry's outdated practices were not conducive to the needs of a small, fast-growing business like Code&Quill. The company's logistics manager, Dan Otto, found himself waiting up to 48 hours for a single freight quote, and the lack of transparency and efficiency in the process was hindering the company's growth. The team needed a solution that would streamline their shipping process, cut costs, and save time, allowing them to focus on their core business.

The global logistics industry has faced significant disruption since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, with inflationary pressures, trade pattern shifts, and elevated logistics costs. Ocean freight prices, particularly China-West Coast US rates, have seen a downward trend, reaching pre-pandemic levels. The volumes of imported containers to the US saw a decline through November 2022, and congestion at key ports like LA/Long Beach significantly eased. However, the rates for shipping a 40-ft container from Asia to the US West Coast have dropped by over 80% since the end of April 2022, and prices to the East Coast have fallen by almost two-thirds. This decline in logistics costs is primarily due to a reduction in consumer spending, which has impacted sales among many importers over the last two years. Furthermore, labor disputes and contract negotiations among port worker unions have added to the complexities of the situation.

One of America's largest non-profit agricultural advocacy organizations was struggling with outdated, manual shipping processes. They were shipping nearly 3,000 annual shipments, predominantly within their state, with almost 80% of these shipments being HAZMAT (farm equipment, agricultural products, batteries, etc.). As they prepared to expand their operations into more states, they urgently needed a shipping software that could support HAZMAT, provide API connections to their ecommerce platform SuiteCommerce, and integrate into their ERP solution NetSuite. They also needed automation to drastically cut the cost of manual processes and make arranging shipments more efficient. However, they found that not all shipping software or TMS solutions could support HAZMAT shipping, leading to wasted time in contract negotiations and training for a trial that ultimately proved unsuccessful.

A Pennsylvania-based grocery distributor was struggling with inefficient manual processes for obtaining freight quotes, organizing shipments, printing labels, and tracking shipments. This was a time-consuming task that took away from the staff's ability to focus on sales and business growth. The distributor was handling approximately 400 mostly reefer shipments across the country annually, relying on over 50 brokers across various regions. This made the import of their carrier list into any transportation software they decided to use crucial to minimize service disruptions. Additionally, the distributor required a system that could seamlessly handle blind shipping, providing the necessary paperwork and labeling for these shipments and setting up business rules per shipment.

A manufacturer of high-performance taps, drills, and rotary files was facing several challenges in their shipping process. Their existing Transport Management System (TMS) shipping software was becoming obsolete and was set to lose IT support by Fall 2021. This posed a significant risk to their operations, as they heavily relied on this software for their shipping needs. Additionally, they had specific requirements for custom labeling, including SSC 128 labels, special labels for their Aerospace clients, and special configurations on packing slips. The manufacturer, with a history of nearly 120 years, had high expectations of quality and reliability, and sought a partner that could provide ongoing support and meet their unique needs.

A major private label manufacturer with over 50 production lines was facing a significant challenge in managing their HAZMAT and international shipping needs. The company, which also operates a contract packaging and filling business, ships freight and parcel all over the world, with numerous product lines categorized as dangerous goods. They were in need of a Transportation Management System (TMS) solution that could streamline their HAZMAT and international shipments with reliable results. The company's specific requirements included a shipping software that could streamline HAZMAT shipments, ensure smooth, high-volume international shipping, and quickly and smoothly integrate with their top carriers and business system.

The customer, a global retailer specializing in mobile phones, was facing significant challenges in their international shipping processes. They were shipping to over 80 countries and were struggling with double effort, mistakes, and lack of leverage in negotiating carrier rates. Their processes were fractured and they were in dire need of high-level integration between their shipping and NetSuite ERP. The customer had minimal tools to organize their high volume shipping, with most of their international movements being organized through emails to freight forwarders. This was cumbersome, caused them to miss lead times, and provided no business intelligence to help them negotiate rates or improve carrier service. They also relied heavily on manual processes in generating required carrier and Customs documentation, leading to double-entry and numerous costly mistakes. Furthermore, a lack of integration between the customer's shipping processes and ERP meant they had no visibility into shipping data across their organization, leading to siloed data and numerous fractured systems.

The customer, a high-end furniture brand designing for online catalogs and IKEA home & storage systems, was facing significant challenges in their shipping and logistics processes. They were overwhelmed with the launch of new products and SKUs and were in dire need of a streamlined shipping process to ease the burden on their customers and internal teams. They also required a reliable method to attach costs to orders by quickly securing carrier shipping rates and adding their markup of 15%. The primary challenges included gathering accurate shipping quotes for their clients purchasing from retail and vendor websites, automating the rate shopping process, and building repeatable and scalable shipping processes that could handle their growth.

In early March, news organizations across the U.S. initiated an Accelerator Program with the Facebook Journalism Project. The primary objective was to collaboratively enhance their digital subscription businesses, with a particular emphasis on subscriber engagement and retention. This initiative was a follow-up to the Accelerator’s pilot program in 2018, which focused on acquiring digital subscribers. The challenge was to improve subscription retention and engage the newsroom to help keep subscribers engaged. The participating publishers, including the Omaha World-Herald, Miami Herald, Philadelphia Media Network, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Denver Post, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Dallas Morning News, Seattle Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, the Tennessean, the San Francisco Chronicle, Newsday and Advance Local for Syracuse.com, among others, were tasked with building on these learnings over the next nine months.

Frost & Sullivan, a global market research and business consulting firm, faced a significant challenge in managing the editing process for their research reports. The team, led by Tonya Fowler, was responsible for crafting detailed reports on some of the world's most innovative companies. This task required a substantial amount of writing, editing, and reviewing. Despite hiring top-notch writers, the editing process remained a critical aspect to ensure the highest quality of material. Tonya had implemented a peer review process, but it was time-consuming and lacked objectivity. The challenge was to find a solution that could streamline the editing process, reduce the time spent on it, and maintain the quality of the reports.

A global Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) company, serving a wide range of industries from finance to telecommunications, was facing a significant challenge in improving the quality of its customer service. The company was dealing with a high volume of support requests daily across various channels, including live chat and email. However, the quality of communication was a major concern, leading to complaints from clients and their customers. The company was also facing penalties due to unhappy clients. The challenge was further compounded by the fact that many of the customer service agents were non-native English speakers. While they had a good command of English, the lack of appropriate tools and time constraints made it difficult for them to ensure their messages were clear and professional. The company tried using canned responses, but this approach was not effective for complex customer support questions and often made customers feel like they were talking to a robot.

The enterprise software company, with a customer base of over 1000, was facing a challenge in creating impactful and efficient customer support. The company's success was partly measured based on a net promoter score (NPS), which indicates the likelihood of customers recommending their services to others. To improve this metric, the company aimed to develop the soft skills of its team, particularly in the quality of communication to customers in support tickets. Being a global organization, the company needed a solution that could cater to its diverse team and help increase the speed of issue resolution, thereby improving the customer experience. They also wanted a solution that could track and analyze progress.

HackerOne, a platform that enables companies to work with the hacker community to identify and report security vulnerabilities, faced a unique challenge. The company had to cater to two distinct audiences - the hacker community and enterprise businesses. The challenge was to build relationships with senior executives to convey value at public and private organizations while also appealing to hackers around the globe, enticing them to participate in the community, grow their skills, and scan for bugs in customer assets. Both audiences were critical to HackerOne’s success. The company's brand voice had to balance the professionalism enterprise leaders expect while continuing to engage the hackers they rely on to power their platform. The HackerOne marketing team faced a twofold challenge: balancing the brand voice and bringing it to life consistently. They foresaw challenges when it set out to refresh the brand voice and update the website. With the need to manage a variety of team members and contractors, maintaining consistent quality of content and tone of voice in web pages, blogs, ebooks, and sales collateral was challenging.

A leading web hosting platform was grappling with the challenge of unclear and confusing customer support interactions. Despite the support team's extensive product knowledge, their written responses often lacked clarity, leading to low customer satisfaction scores. The company identified a correlation between grammatical errors in support tickets and these low scores. As a result, the leadership began to rely heavily on team members with strong writing skills, leading to an uneven distribution of workload. This overburdened high-performing employees and deprived others of opportunities to improve. The company sought a solution to balance the workload and enhance the overall team experience.

Lucid, a high-growth research technology (ResTech) company, was facing a challenge in maintaining its high customer satisfaction (CSAT) numbers while scaling its customer support team. The company, which provides programmatic access to first-party data, has a global presence with customers and employees worldwide. As the company expanded, the customer support team grew from five to seventeen agents. Despite the growth, the team managed to maintain a high CSAT score of 4.86 out of 5. However, the challenge was to sustain these numbers while continuing to grow. The team's technical knowledge was commendable, but there were opportunities to improve communication. The company needed a solution that would help the agents deliver technical expertise with confidence, clarity, and consistency in their communication. The solution also needed to instill trust in the agents to nurture customer relationships with quality.

A national mortgage lender with offices across the United States was grappling with internal communication challenges that were negatively impacting team morale, engagement, and productivity. These issues were also affecting customer-facing communication, leading to missed performance goals and lost customers. Despite a favorable market environment with record-low mortgage rates and a booming real estate market, the lender was losing customers due to poor communication. The lender recognized the need to improve communication but faced two distinct challenges. Firstly, they needed to create new communication frameworks and higher quality standards and quickly onboard and coach team members for success. Secondly, they needed to ensure that the changes unified their salespeople and created a more cohesive, effective community of teams without squashing the competitive nature of selling.

Trulia, a real estate platform owned by Zillow Group, faced a significant challenge when it began developing its own content in-house about two years ago. The content, which showcases unique homes and neighborhoods across the country, is designed to educate users about the home buying and renting process. Each week, Trulia’s content team produces several blog posts, videos, and sharable social content, often filled with data and analysis. The team also creates a series of homebuying and renting guides that cover a wide range of topics. However, ensuring that all this content is polished, clear, and error-free was a daunting task. Additionally, as the company continued to grow, it was creating more content for its blog, social channels, and products, which further compounded the challenge of maintaining quality while scaling.

Zapier, a company that helps customers connect thousands of apps through customized, automated processes, faced a challenge in maintaining consistency in their written communication. As the company grew, the number of documents and style guides used across teams increased, leading to confusion about which information was accurate and updated. The company had specific branded terms and partner names that needed to be used consistently and correctly, requiring a robust writing and editing process. However, team members found it challenging to maintain a single source of truth. During the editing process, team members often had to take time to fix errors, especially with partner names, as mistakes could diminish trust, deteriorate relationships, and create additional editing work if not addressed before publishing.

Adore Me, a fast-growing startup, was facing challenges with content generation. The company was looking for a solution to handle the 'boring, structured stuff' that was taking up a significant amount of their writers' time. They wanted their writers to focus on more creative endeavors and work on the next big project or campaign. The company was also keen on staying ahead of the curve, exploring tools and technologies that could become part of every retailer's toolkit in the future. The challenge was to find a tool that could cater to their specific needs, deliver on its promises, and help make their processes better and more efficient.

Alva Labs, a company building a candidate assessment platform aimed at reducing bias and creating a more inclusive hiring process, was in the process of transitioning from sales-led growth to product-led growth. This transition required their website to function as a 24/7 salesperson, necessitating a variety of content offerings for their target audience, which primarily consisted of talent acquisition professionals, recruiters, HR managers, and CHROs. The content needed to reflect Alva's brand pillars of being aspirational, progressive, essential, and approachable. However, maintaining brand consistency across all content was a challenge, especially as some of their content production staff were not native English speakers. Furthermore, Alva operates in a competitive market, making brand differentiation through language crucial to their content strategy.

Ellevest, a financial services company, was facing a significant challenge in maintaining its unique brand voice and inclusive style guide across all its content. The company's content strategy was built by women for women, aiming to address the gender gap in the financial services industry. However, the company was struggling with inefficiencies and bottlenecks in the content creation process. Much of the company's brand voice and style guide knowledge was held by a few individuals who had been with the company for years. This situation created a bottleneck, as only these individuals could effectively edit content to ensure it aligned with the company's voice and style guide. The challenge was to find a way to train more people on the style guide more quickly, release these bottlenecks, and empower more team members to create content that accurately represented the brand.

iManage, a leading provider of work product management solutions, faced a significant challenge in scaling their knowledge management resources. The company had a wealth of knowledge to harness, not just from the support team but from the entire organization. However, the process of reviewing and editing content before publishing led to a backlog of articles, hindering their ability to scale and discouraging potential authors. The company needed a solution that would enable them to quickly and efficiently publish quality content, without the need for extensive review and editing. Additionally, they needed a way to ramp up new writers on iManage’s style guides and content guidelines, and to enable a team-publishing model that would allow non-writers to produce great content.

UiPath, a leading enterprise software company, faced a significant challenge in maintaining brand consistency as it grew rapidly. A few years ago, the company underwent a complete brand revamp, evolving into a conversational, friendly, and engaging brand voice. However, as the company expanded, it struggled to maintain this brand voice across all its content. The company lacked a single source of truth for identifying how to format a product name correctly or how to write and sound like UiPath. The initial solution was a 65-page content style guide, but it proved to be a burden to distribute and expect all contributors to understand and follow it. The challenge was to find a dynamic, living, breathing source that could help maintain brand consistency across the company.