Search in Help & Support could be so much better.
The way many companies organise the Help & Support pages on their websites feels more like an afterthought than part of a customer experience strategy. The onus is on the customer to either navigate their way through triage questions, to read through a list of FAQs, or to put some words into a search and hope they match keywords in the correct, most up-to-date article (then they have to read the article). This kind of friction can really frustrate customers and can lead to calls and contacts that should have been avoided, or missed sales that should have been made. Ignoring search is ignoring the way most people begin an online journey or find out how to do something – think to google as a verb (and lmgtfy as a text speak response to a question)
Basically keyword search works by looking for the frequency of occurrences of the individual words in the search text across the indexed content – results are then ranked and presented based on the occurrence. In some cases, documents can be tagged with additional meta-data like explicit search keywords and keyword synonyms which when maintained correctly can improve the results of a keyword search by influencing the ranking. But ultimately if the search terms don’t match indexed keywords then the results are likely to disappoint a customer
When customers come to Help & Support, they aren’t always sure of the best way to formulate a query. They don’t know the right words to use, or how to spell them, they’re looking to learn and don’t necessarily have the knowledge to begin with. At its core, Search is about language, to figure out what a customer is searching for and surface helpful information, no matter how words are combined. Cognitive search processes words semantically, understanding the full context of a word by looking at the words that come before and after it – dramatically improving the search experience.
Take a look at Fluent Find, our solution for cognitive search
Fluent Find
Make finding Help & Support a great customer experience. We’ve written about the challenges with website search for Help & Support. In short, keyword matching isn’t up to the task of giving customers what they need when they search – too much of the onus is placed on the customer to know in advance the…