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SonderMind
- Denver-based mental health company
- 550 employees across multiple entities
- Relevant technology stack: Jira, Slack
Key outcomes in the first month
- 95% of HR tickets resolved automatically, with no human intervention
- Live in a matter of weeks
- Full visibility into request volume and categories for the first time
A lean team routing every ticket manually
SonderMind runs its People function deliberately lean, on the principle that the right people, processes, and systems let a small team do a lot. As the company grew past 550 employees across multiple entities, the model started to strain.
HR requests ran through Jira, either as formal tickets or as emails to a group address that opened a ticket automatically. From there, one person acted as the administrator, reading each request and routing it to whoever could answer. A large share of the team's day went to fielding routine, repetitive questions that a small team could not afford to spend its time on.
The bottleneck wasn't the size of the team. It was the structure. A person sat in the middle as a router, and the data was scattered across systems, since plenty of questions arrived through Slack and never touched Jira at all. That left reporting incomplete and largely anecdotal, so the team could not see clearly where demand was really coming from.
"My team was handling a lot of day-to-day questions that were taking a lot of time to respond. We could use our time better elsewhere if we could find a way to automate that."
Sara Sanchez, VP of People, SonderMind
Why Sondermind chose Kinfolk
Sara found Kinfolk through LinkedIn and reached out the same day, having concluded nothing else on the market solved the problem the same way. Three things made the decision:
- Purpose-built for HR, so it could resolve the bulk of repetitive requests and give a deliberately lean team its time back for higher-value work
- One connected system that plugged into the existing stack and turned scattered questions into categorized, visible data, not just answers
- A partner that moved fast and built around SonderMind's specific use case, rather than handing over a rigid product
Implementation: live in weeks, not a year
SonderMind piloted Kinfolk and another tool at the same time, with contracts signed and kickoffs run in parallel. The comparison was stark. The other tool took almost a year to get running and was hard to justify on ROI.
Kinfolk was live in a matter of weeks, and the setup, connecting the knowledge base and training the system, was simple enough that when a team member transitioned mid-rollout, the new owner picked it up quickly and kept the momentum.
"We saw immediate ROI on the product. We had something like 95% of tickets reduced as soon as we rolled this out. You see that and you're like, why didn't we do this sooner?"
Sara Sanchez, VP of People, SonderMind
Impact speaks for itself
95% of tickets resolved without a person in the middle
Once Kinfolk was live, the team saw upwards of 95% of tickets resolved automatically, and utilization climbed as adoption grew.
The one person who had spent their days routing questions in Jira was freed to work on projects that moved the business forward, the kind of work that had always slipped to the back burner for lack of time.
Visibility the team never had from Jira
For the first time, SonderMind could see not just how many questions came in, but how they broke down by category.
When a large share of questions clustered around one topic like benefits, that was a signal: the information either wasn't clear or wasn't easy to find. The team could get ahead of it, put better resources in front of employees, and cut the questions off before they were asked.
"It's given us more data than we ever had access to before, and we're just able to take more of a proactive approach."
Sara Sanchez, VP of People, SonderMind
Adoption that spread beyond HR
SonderMind rebranded Kin as SonderPal through a gamified, company-wide naming contest, and adoption took off from there.
Other teams began asking for something similar for their own workflows, and People Ops has kept iterating to pull more out of the platform.
What started as an HR tool became something the wider company wanted in.
The result: a lean team doing the work that matters
With the administrative load handled by AI, the People team redirected its time to the work that moves the business and energizes the people doing it.
SonderMind is now looking at the next handoffs to AI: agentic assistants, and an HR business partner in a manager's pocket for performance conversations and low-level employee relations, taught to respond the SonderMind way so people leaders can self-serve on the moments that used to escalate.
"It's a complete non-negotiable at this point. You see the ROI immediately. It takes the administrative components out of an HR team and gives the team back time. It's hard to think about how we were operating before."
Sara Sanchez, VP of People, SonderMind