Intelligent Search – Do you Really Understand the Question?
Transversal discusses intelligent search and its impact on customer effort, the first article in a five-part series about the future of knowledge management
"We have been trying for over 50 years to manage knowledge with different degrees of success. We created technology, processes, even a culture of knowledge that was supposed to ensure organizations could corral, manage, and reuse knowledge at the drop of a hat in any instance, at any time, via any channel, integrated into any technology. Needless to say, it hasn't happened." – Esteban Kolsky
Effective knowledge management is the key to gaining a solid customer service strategy in today's digital world. But how do you keep up with an ever-changing set of knowledge management trends, and ensure you come out in front of them in the future?
In this five-part series, leading knowledge solutions provider Transversal will look at the hottest trends in knowledge management today and examine how they will develop over the next five years. In this first part, we focus on intelligent search.
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The rise of the internet and digitalization has transformed the way consumers interact with brands. Paired with the explosion in social media usage we've witnessed since the birth of Twitter, Facebook and its many and varied relations, consumers are demanding more information from brands than ever before.
Presenting consumers with the exact information they're looking for, however, is incredibly hard to get right, particularly with no human contact involved. The simple truth is that it can often be difficult to understand customer questions online, for a variety of reasons:
· No two people ask the same question in the same way; there are nuances in language, abbreviations and slang that mean the phrasing of the question varies significantly
· Customers with difficulties understanding their problem can struggle to ask the right questions
· Often the initial question is too vague to know where to begin; in such cases the correct response can only be prompted through a series of questions
But if brands hope to deliver any kind of accurate answer to a customer, this understanding is vital. As Kolsky said, ""The number one reason customers leave is because companies fail to deliver answers." Most consumers have a very limited patience span when searching for an answer and unfortunately for the brand. Having spent so much time and resources trying to get consumers onto its website to begin with, if the individual doesn't find his answer the first time round, it is easy enough for him to go elsewhere.
As a result "Intelligent Search" is one of the hottest trends in knowledge management today and is something we are now seeing promised in most of the leading knowledge management solutions available. Used to describe superior search capabilities, intelligent search engines are able to understand what the customer is looking for by offering semantic and concept-based searching to find the right content, even if what is entered is worded slightly differently. To quoteJohn Ragsdale, VP Research, Technology & Social, TSIA, "Intelligent search understands the way you phrase something; it understands exactly what you're looking for. It's able to find matching content even if it's worded slightly differently."
In other words, it figures out what the customer means, not just what is typed.
While many companies now claim this capability, proving it isn't just a case of pointing to a mathematical formula i.e. the answer mathematically matches the question. Instead brands need to make sure that the customer is satisfied with what they have found andthat the answer has met their particular expectations. This can be done in a variety of ways, none of which necessarily require asking the customer directly for their feedback. Looking at the customer journey, and how much effort they were required to make, will give brands a good indication of a successful outcome: Did the customer conduct a second search, did he need to scroll to a second page of results on the initial search? What did he click on immediately after his search?
As this trend evolves over the next five years, we will see an even smarter and more proactive form of intelligent search. Based on triggers in customer behavior, the context of recent website activity (route to website, pages viewed, dwell time), or even data from external sources (calendar, GPS location) the search process will start running independently of the customers eventually becoming so intelligent that the results are waiting for them before they're even aware they needed them.
Using tools such as TrendWatch, brands should also be able to monitor real-time events to influence search results as they take place and increase their intelligence as a result. For an example of what this might look like, consider how different a search for "security" on the Talk Talk website would look like today in comparison to mid-October. Intelligent search should recognize that the security information visitors are now looking for has changed dramatically, even though the words they are using to articulate their search may not have done so at all, and bring up very different results as a result.
Intelligent search certainly isn't going to be one of those trends which appears in an instant but is gone in a flash— it's here to stay. As with the majority of the trends this series will discuss, its impact on consumer effort will be the key to its ongoing relevance. As Kate Leggett comments in her blog on Forrester's top trends for customer service in 2015 – "Good service […] should be pain-free, proactive at a minimum and preemptive at best."
Regards
Pralhad Jadhav
Khaitan & Co
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