Home » What We're Thinking » Keystone Archive » July 2009
If your search strategy isn't at the heart of your overall online strategy, you are missing a huge competitive advantage. Why? Today, whether it's a customer on your website or an employee looking for information, the expectation is useful results in a matter of seconds.
And in fact enterprise search is evolving into much more than just search and find. It is a function that can change behaviour both inside the organization and amongst customers.
A good analogy for where search is going is to think of being at the mall, and instead of trying to find a specific shoe store on the map, you ask the lady at the information kiosk. She answers, "It's one floor down, they're having a big sale. And there are ten other shoe stores in this mall. Are you looking for shoes, or accessories? If you tell me more, I can guide you to the best store for your needs."
With this in mind, we'll take a closer look at the changing enterprise search landscape. We've put together 7 ways to increase productivity through enterprise search as well as a great Q&A with our own Alison Davies on serving customers better with search.
We value your feedback. If you have any questions, or want to discuss any of the issues raised in this newsletter, please get in touch.
Regards,
imason
After email, search functionality is the number two Internet application. But search engines do more than simply connect us to what we are looking for. They also create a culture of instant online gratification, both among customers and employees. Today, when website visitors don't find what they are looking for in less time than it takes to scan an email, they go right back to the search engine.
Whether it's a customer on your website or an employee looking for information, the expectation is now to find an answer — the answer — in a matter of seconds.
The meaning of search strategy has evolved to capture these new expectations. Until recently, the term referred to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) techniques like optimization and pay-per-click campaigns that brought prospects to the website. Now organizations are beginning to take responsibility for getting customers all the way to the answer, tailoring their search strategies to improving satisfaction and conversion.
The key to achieving this is customer-facing corporate search. It puts control firmly in the hands of website visitors, extending the search engine experience to your website. It's the most effective way of increasing customer acquisition and retention. It's also the single most highly used website application.
The new generation of corporate search tool assumes that the visitor doesn't know where to find what she is looking for. It takes on the role of subject matter expert, providing faceted search results to support the user as she distills the context of her query. Corporate search is intelligent - it surfaces information through the filter of a known business context and learns user preferences through behaviour, profile information and past queries.
By delivering information based on context, customer-facing search extends the time prospects spend on your site, building loyalty and trust towards the source of the information - and gives visitors a reason to begin the next query with you rather than with a search engine.
Even when context doesn't factor in, customer-facing corporate search does more than spit out closest match results. To illustrate this, we created a fictitious bank website. The following search results for 'TFSA' include the option of opening an account; an overview, benefits and comparisons as well as top FAQs - all in addition to ranked results. There is also a local subject area specialist on hand, sourced through website user location tracking. Do you think that a prospect is more likely to return to a search engine in frustration, or to bookmark this website for future reference?
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Search does the same thing for employees as it does for customers. Born out of a recognition that search saves a tremendous amount of time, employee-facing corporate search also strengthens satisfaction.
Most organizations have a variety of information resources that employees draw upon. Even if the search functionality within these systems is robust, it is limited to that particular information resource. Corporate search works across any number of corporate data systems, the public domain and subscription-based databases.
As it does for customers, corporate search provides employees with information based on context and past behaviour, improving results as time goes on. And the timing for introducing search to the organization couldn't be better. According to a recent Forrester report, corporate content volume is growing by as much as 200 percent annually.
For some organizations, levels of information are such that they actually interfere with productivity rather than contributing to it. To which camp does your organization belong?
Does customer-facing or employee-facing enterprise search make sense for you? It depends on your needs. Consider the following:
To better understand your needs, or for more information about imason's search solutions, contact Jeff Dunmall.
Find out more about imason's search offering
For background information on Microsoft search products:
A recent IDC study found that the average employee commonly spends 9.5 hours per week searching for information and another 3 hours recreating what already exists. That may seem like a surprising amount of time lost to inefficiency, but given that the average worker makes regular use of over a dozen business applications, perhaps it's not so surprising after all.
When data is stored across email applications, file systems, and databases, it makes sense that simply performing multiple searches within a variety of applications will eat into productivity - even if search results are good.
So what is the answer?
Enterprise search frees employees from the frustration of multiple searches and mediocre results. We've put together seven ways that enterprise search can help you increases productivity and satisfaction.
Designed and implemented correctly, enterprise search strategy can:
Enterprise search bridges information silos with high-performance access. This increases productivity by greatly reducing the amount of time employees spend either trying to locate the information they need or simply giving up and creating it all over again.
Organizations typically have multiple employee education and communication channels, including intranets, internal newsletters, bulletins, electronic memos, and circulars. The issue is that it's up to the employee to make sense of this deluge of information.
Employees typically narrow their focus and disregard certain information channels, or give up altogether and continue to do what they are comfortable doing. As a result, uptake of new techniques and procedures is slow, creating inefficiency and rework: businesses can lose revenue, customers, productivity, intelligence, and competitive advantage. Search allows employees to track topics, spot trends, make connections, and discover insights in context with their intentions.
Search leverages valuable corporate information that too often exists but is difficult to procure. Federated search does one better: queries can be drawn not only from repositories of corporate information, but also from subscription or academic databases and information in the public domain. This results in better market intelligence, competitive intelligence and research - speeding employees on their way to the required state of knowledge.
Smart search applications learn the topic and search preferences of individual users over time. Users can also set automatic search parameters or flag a topic so that new information is delivered when it becomes available. Results become more refined and precise over time as corporate search continues to learn, bringing ever more timely and useful information as users' interests and needs change. For example, search results can be tuned by role: if you work in the Canadian division of a multinational, content from other geographies can appear lower in the results list.
Making all documents instantly accessible will not only increase productivity, but can also free up space. Even when information exists in digital form, if it's hard to find, employees will revert to thumbing through paper files. Search can lower demand for paper that can then be relocated or eliminated, allowing for more efficient use of expensive real estate.
The layout of search results can substantially enhance the speed and extent to which information is absorbed. Some people are visual learners while others are listeners and readers. Video, podcasts and other media form part of today's search results. Search learns users' preferences and delivers what works best for them.
The way that search results are organized on the screen can also dramatically increase uptake. Dynamic clustering is one example. It's a technique borrowed from the field of computer science: it organizes results into categories based on similar content, providing what amounts to visual cues for the brain. Employees can easily custom-tailor search systems' clustering efforts by tagging documents as belonging to a certain category, thus giving the system examples to train on. These techniques, common on consumer-facing retail sites, are now slowing finding their way inside the firewall.
Put more employees on the fast track through satisfying conversational search experiences. Employees can tag and annotate the information resources they find most useful, providing context and richer information for future searchers. In this way, information ratings will accumulate over time and more quickly point the way towards the best sources.
These are just some of the ways that search can increase productivity in the Enterprise. To discover the specific benefits that enterprise search can bring to your organization, or to learn more about the technology as a whole, contact Jeff Dunmall.
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This month Keystone sat down with Alison Davies, imason's Director of Customer-facing Solutions, to discuss enterprise search.
We learned that the prevalence of search has changed user behaviour and expectations. As a consequence, enterprise search strategy is undergoing a huge change. Today, the right search strategy must engage visitors and help them decide exactly what they are looking for.
Keystone: Let's start by putting customer search in context. Just how important is it?
AD: Nowadays, people have become so accustomed to starting an Internet session with a search engine query that they expect the experience to extend to the destination site. Conditioned by Google, customers are in the driver's seat. They want to control the search experience, they want to plug in their words, and they want to find the information they need very quickly, with very little effort. And if they don't find it, they're gone, back to the search engine. The bottom line is that right now search is empowering and that's what people want.
Keystone: What is biggest change enterprises need to make when it comes to search as a strategy?
AD: Enterprises need to recognize that customer behaviour can have a serious effect on the success of your website from both a revenue-generation and a cost-containment standpoint. If you don't make search the foundation of your online channel strategy, how can you compete with someone else that has? Simply put, the faster users can find what they are looking for, the more likely they are to complete a transaction.
Keystone: So what is the difference between search as a utility and as a strategy? Where do search tools fit in?
AD: The difference between search as a utility and search as a strategy is approach. Search as a utility - take Google Search Appliance, for example - provides a specific set of results that best answer an inquiry based on a couple of words. But when an organization both acknowledges and believes that providing a superior search experience for customers creates quantifiable value, they want to maximize that value. And that requires enterprise-specific search tools. They deal not only with the specifics of the inquiry, but also with the context. They initiate a conversation, so to speak.
Keystone: Which verticals and organizations are best suited for search and why?
AD: Because both have mandates to generate revenue from their websites, the early adopters were retail and media. Retail in particular because the business case for ROI is straightforward: if it can be shown that investing $X in a search solution will yield $6X within a given timeframe, the cost/benefit analysis is clear.
Content-intensive verticals other than media are also realizing the value of enhanced site search. The financial services sector and government are two examples. Financial services is a particularly good example because competition is fierce and data is vast. Effective search can be a key competitive differentiator.
Keystone: Can you break down what implementing a successful enterprise search strategy looks like for a customer?
AD: First of all, they find what they are looking for, and they are often presented results that also contain contextually relevant information. So it is an enriching experience, a better experience.
And for website visitors who don't know exactly what they are looking for, enterprise search can help them narrow their focus by engaging with them to better define what their needs are. It doesn't just spit out the results that most closely match a one or two-word inquiry, but suggests context and learns habits and preferences as you go. Again, it's a better experience over all.
Keystone: So what should an organization do to get started with enterprise search?
AD: You need to establish a benchmark for where the organization is today with respect to search. Start by asking a few key questions. Has search been considered as a means of increasing revenue and reducing costs? What are you using to measure your current site traffic metrics and user patterns? Do you gather customer feedback regarding their experience on the website? The truth is, every organization is different. It doesn't take long to drill down to questions specific to each client.
Keystone: What are the biggest challenges involved in getting businesses to choose search as an underlying strategy?
AD: The challenge is that departments have different mandates. They act autonomously, introducing tactical solutions designed to meet their specific needs. But search has the potential to provide a cohesive experience for customers that can benefit the organization's offering regardless of department. Getting stakeholders to step back from their line of business objectives is difficult if the concept is not supported at the top.
Keystone: Where do you see the future of search going?
AD: I see search driving design. Search has historically been a box stuck in the upper right hand corner of the website. Information architecture, navigation, content placement and interface creative will still be important, but the focus has shifted: people are demanding the control that search represents. That might mean more sites using search to transform the home-page into a gateway to information. Or it might mean wider use of web page templates comprised of search-driven content – we will have to wait and see.
Either way, search will remain a primary focus of the user experience. The box that now sits in the upper right hand corner will be front and centre, literally and figuratively!
Alison Davies is imason's Director for Customer Facing Solutions. Originally from the professional services arena, Alison has spent the last decade honing her skills in the interactive/technology sector. Her primary focus lies in identifying the right solution for clients' most pressing business challenges: revenue generation, cost containment and increasing customer satisfaction.
For more information about enterprise search, or to find out how search can help your organization, contact Alison Davies.
Torys LLP wanted to improve the user experience on their website, so imason built Torys.com on a Microsoft SharePoint technology platform. The robust search and content management allows visitors to find exactly what they want while greatly improving administrator analytics.
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