Knowledge Management for a Superapp — Customer Stories with Grab

Southeast Asia’s largest superapp connects millions of consumers to millions of drivers, merchants, and businesses. The top priorities for a superapp are the availability of relevant information, an easy collaboration of big teams, and security. The case study shares how OneBar helped Grab to integrate a knowledge management system into Slack channels focused on engineering queries.

Grab is a multinational ride-hailing company with headquarters in Singapore. In addition to transportation, the company offers food delivery and digital payment services via a mobile app. Grab is taking on the largest problems that affect the region, including unequal access, outdated infrastructure, and income disparity.

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With years in the market, Grab became a rich source of internal and external data circulating in the company’s Slack channels. Soon, it became evident to the management that engineers were the only team members possessing the easiest access to the original answers for the frequently asked questions. It revealed that the company struggled with several knowledge management challenges.

Challenges

With a particular team governing most of the vital knowledge of the company, Grab had a hard time ensuring the following:

• Flawless documentation discovery and findability. Documents were often scattered across different knowledge sources, cluttered and outdated.
• Awareness of employees about the location of information. Grab engineers processed repetitive requests, which hindered their productivity and ability to focus.
• Information availability within one system for the employees to easily search for necessary documents.

Grab decided to integrate OneBar into Slack channels receiving most of the repetitive queries, build an internal FAQ base, and give equal access to all employees.

Solution

OneBar is an AI-driven knowledge management software that integrates with essential tools like Slack, Google Drive, and Confluence. With OneBar, companies can build an internal Q&A forum and eliminate the need to ask the same questions repeatedly.

We decided to go with OneBar because it acts as a knowledge management system on its own and allows everyone to contribute to the information shared by the bot. It has a crowdsourced way to feed the bot, which was the main selling point for us.

© Preeti G. Karkera, Technical Writer, Program Manager at Grab

Basically, the integration of OneBar into Grab went in just four stages:

1. Integration of Slack with Confluence and creation of a Slackbot (chatbot). It helped answer the most common questions on behalf of the platform’s team members.
2. Shortlisting channels with the most engineering queries and discussions and giving teams more priority because the questions there tend to be more of the FAQ format.
3. Instructing co-workers that crowdsourced Slack discussions and conclusions could be easily saved onto the bots directly from Slack with just a single command.
4. Importing the company Glossary to the bot to navigate definitions of internally used terms and acronyms.

OneBar keeps both answered and unanswered questions in a central location. This feature makes it convenient to search through and view all the saved and analyzed FAQs.

As long as OneBar runs everything on AWS, it works great for Grab’s internal security considerations and checks.

© Preeti G. Karkera, Technical Writer, Program Manager at Grab

OneBar bot does not need to be called. It reads channel data continuously and responds to queries with recorded answers. It means Grab didn’t have to get everyone to learn a new tool. OneBar acts in a fashion similar to Slack custom responses.

Apart from not having to call the bot, no login is required, which again feels like people are using Slack and not a completely new tool.

© Preeti G. Karkera, Technical Writer, Program Manager at Grab

Summing Up

With OneBar, Grab has managed to:

• Give access to the company’s glossary in Slack;
• Create an internal FAQ;
• Help the engineering team focus on their primary tasks.

Grab plans to integrate OneBar for more teams so everyone can experience the advantages.

Many new teams have come forward to request the onboarding of the bot to their team’s channels. We see the interest and enthusiasm only growing more prominent within the company.

© Preeti G. Karkera, Technical Writer, Program Manager at Grab