“Hey, got a sec?”

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We’ve all been there. The dreaded chat message from a coworker… it goes something like this:

“Hey, uh, can you help show me how to do that thing?” 

First comes the silent scream. It’s the fourth time they’ve asked. And the second person today. The morning was going so well. You take a deep breath, you try to stay patient. But just like that, you feel your day slipping away.

Every day, across every organization, the same struggle takes place – and that’s exactly why we built Tango! Originally we academically called it the knowledge transfer cost. Lately we’ve just been calling it the “How Do I…?” Spiral.

5 years in, it only feels right to take stock of where things stand and what we’ve learned defeating the Spiral.

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To teach or not to teach…

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After that dreaded “how to” question, every expert feels it: a flash of frustration.

“Susie has no intention of learning. Should you just do it for her? Should you try to explain? If you don’t, she will just be back later.”

A consequential decision, indeed. There’s a lot of tradeoffs and truths to navigate.

Will people actually remember what you teach?

• 90% of information is lost after trainings (Ebbinghaus’ The Forgetting Curve)

Will the instructions and documentation you create just get lost?

• 20% of the workweek is spent looking for information and 49% don’t trust their knowledge base (McKinsey)

It makes you wonder… is teaching ever worth it?

At Tango, we think a promise of making procedural knowledge useful and discoverable is essential to the motivation to teach or share. If you’re going to ask someone to make the effort, leave no doubt that it’s impactful. 

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Teach it Once

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If there’s one lasting promise we want to make to every expert and organization, it’s this: 

Teach it once.

Your effort will be worth it because your know-how will be easy to find, easy to use, and easy to build on. That’s how a true culture of knowledge sharing takes shape.

Today, Tango powers 300+ Enterprise customers, tens of thousands of Pro teams, and over 1 million users. Together, they’ve created nearly 4 million Tangos, each one helping to end the “How Do I…?” Spiral for good.

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The Spiral, Interrupted

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Tango customers are defeating the Spiral every day. Some of the results we hear regularly:

• 3x-10x faster to create guides
• Up to 90% of support tickets get deflected 
• Cutting approximately 90% of clicks and 70% of data entry mistakes

What’s coming? Well, for starters we expect more information to be served up increasingly proactively (see: Real-Time Enablement: an Underrated Competitive Edge) so that answers in the flow of work are even more timely and curated. And we expect AI assistants to help auto-complete more actions for users (Tango Browser Agents) to make procedures even easier to execute. Lastly, we expect AI to help us “teach” and share process knowledge more efficiently. 

It’s exciting times! Whether you’ve been a Tango user for a day, a week, or 5 years - thank you! We continue to learn from and be motivated by all of you every day and we can’t wait for what’s ahead.  

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Let’s Tango!