Why Should Your Organization go for an Enterprise Search Tool?
In recent years, the need for searching information has become an inevitable part of business success. And since most of the actionable insights emanate from digital sources, search engines like Google and Bing are now imbued in our personal and professional lives.
It is true that such search engines are perfectly capable of looking up the information we need for our personal needs. But when it comes to business, the requirement is more pronounced and challenging. This is because business information can be complex.
And this is exactly where enterprise search engines come into the picture.
What is an enterprise search?
Enterprise search is a type of search that assists the employees to locate data from one or various databases in a single search query.
Enterprise search is quite different from web search because it uses search technology to find out the information within the enterprise system. It can index and store various types of sources like intranet, file systems, emails, databases and document management systems.
This search is sometimes also termed as vertical search. This is because it emphasises a limited portion of the online content. Such sources for extracting information can prove highly beneficial for internal and external stakeholders.
How does enterprise search work?
Let’s look at the different phases in which the enterprise search works.
Content awareness : It is also referred to as “content collection”. It is a procedure where databases are connected so the search engine can access them easily.
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Content processing : Incoming contents from various databases have various formats. These formats can be anything from XML to HTML, office document formats or even plain text.
During this phase of enterprise search, the documents get converted into plain text by employing document filters. This transformation allows for an efficient searching process.
The content processing phase also comprises tokenization. For instance, the characters are converted into lowercase to initiate the fast case-insensitive search.
Indexing : Once the content gets processed, the documents are accumulated in an index. This index holds all words as well as information about ranking and term’s frequency.
Serving result as per user queries : The search system then proceeds to compare the query with the documents saved in the index and returns matching results.
Here are some best enterprise search features
Auto-completion of queries : The auto-suggestion feature enhances the user experience of the enterprise search. However, it is best to use tools capable of offering a list of possible completed words and phrases as soon a user starts typing (just like the auto-complete feature of Google).
Apply search analytics : This feature collects the query data of the users. As a result, the insights of the search engine performance can be obtained as well as topics researched by the users.
Evaluate your team’s talent : You can also evaluate the capability of your business to apply a solution. If your team is new to the search engine’s architecture, then you can outsource an integration specialist to assist you in implementing the solution seamlessly.
Major benefits of enterprise search
Employees from all levels and departments can benefit from the best enterprise search engines capabilities. They can look for information on products, support a customer or even retrieve the resume of a certain candidate.
Enterprise search has the capability to add incredible business value in the below ways:
Knowledge Management : Two of the most obvious benefits of enterprise search is finding information and accumulating data. This could be primary information about a specific product/service. It could also be secondary information that leverages your employee’s current knowledge.
Business-crucial information can be spread across various digital platforms as structured or unstructured data. Hence, it becomes necessary that the employed enterprise search platform is able to locate reliable information across disparate systems.
All employees are required to perform their tasks effectively. Sometimes they may even want to produce information using unstructured data. Neatly tucked away data may have no use if they cannot be accessed in the first place, and then processed for an advantage.
Offers overall view : Silos are usually filled with information on projects, specific topics and even issues. Without an overall view of these specific topics, the risks of making bad decisions increases dramatically. This could result in dire consequences.
For instance, a pharmaceutical company producing new drugs may need to have full access to regulatory information. A manufacturer may need to offer the field engineers details on a consolidated view of problems related to the part, etc. Here the biggest obstacle may be blocked up unified view due to data being scattered across various systems and organizational silos.
With enterprise search in place, it becomes easy to break down these silos. This benefit enables the employee to take a quick and easy look at the information on a given topic. They can even gather all the needed to make an informed decision.
Besides, there is no need for a completely separate system or a custom-build data lake to understand the practicality of significant amounts of disorganized information. All you need is a search solution that has the capacity of connecting all the systems, organizing data while ensuring the information is discoverable.
Locate expertise easily : A recent study concluded that 42% of institutional knowledge was unique. This means, if an employee leaves the job, his/her co-worker may not be able to perform 42% of the employee’s particular work.
And since so much information rests with a particular individual, it becomes important to identify and connect the employees with the right expertise. Such business-crucial details should be digitally accessible. Likewise, experts need to be located to answer queries and work on certain projects that need their knowledge or skill set.
The enterprise search can be utilised by the employees to locate very specific expertise inside the organization who are capable of speaking to the data looked for by the employees. By generating this connection between employees and experts, that data can be rightly matched with employees, even if the data isn’t digitized fully.
Better customer service : When it comes to external stakeholders like the customers, the enterprise search system can work as an enabler to better service quality.
For instance, take the case of a customer who browses a company website for information. He/she would expect to receive the details from within the search system and not through various online pages. Once they get the needed information from the search query, they won’t require picking up the phone to contact the company to extract the information. This way, the chance of sending an email reduces, too.
And since businesses do gather unprecedented amounts of data of their customers, it makes no sense in treating them like strangers when they need something from your end.
With enterprise search, businesses can take their services to the next level. And such a type of customer support has an overwhelming impact on the customers. Therefore, increasing customer satisfaction and saving your company’s efforts.
Boosted employee productivity : With enterprise search software in place, organizations can save the time and efforts added by the employees in just searching the information. The extra spare time can be contributed towards the organization by being more productive.
Besides, an enterprise search can also preserve the documents and processes properly, meaning no worries about it being lost over time; thereby, preventing unnecessary replication of work.
Moreover, enterprise search also offers the organization’s employees a platform to collaborate and engage. Even though there are initial setbacks after implementation, the long-term benefits offset them all. Proper training is all that is required to prevent teething problems.
Get the power of enterprise search to accelerate business outcomes
Enterprise search platform was considered a luxury at some point. But now, to stay competitive, it has become a necessary investment. Besides, it is evident from the blog that the right enterprise search platform can generate revenue by rationalizing customer support and enhancing the employee experience.
So, if you are looking forward to implementing an enterprise search platform, connect with us at Wersel. Our proven expertise in custom enterprise products adds many layers of business value. The DiscoverX is ideally positioned to help you extract information from diverse sources. These include emails, instant messages, documents, images, contracts, invoices, and purchase orders. It is the only tool you would need to enable 360-degree search platform that your business needs for the classification and digitization of different forms of information to drive actionable decision-making.
