The Search Engine Psyche Part 2- How Enterprise Search helps you improve Customer Experience
In the first part of this post we talked about the internal stakeholders & search related issues faced by them and how enterprise search can be beneficial to the employees of an organization leading to huge efficiency gains.
Let us now have a look at the other perspective i.e. how enterprise search can help improve the sites facing External audience and the benefits derived out of it. Enterprise search plays a pivotal role in propelling some of the world's largest portals and eCommerce sites.
Without an efficient search it would be extremely difficult for consumers to reach to the information of their interest. For example consider a site selling Cameras, if you enter the site and are unable to reach to the camera of your interest easily, you will obviously loose interest & switch to another site resulting in a lost sale for the site. On the other hand if you enter a site having best of the breed Search platform functionalities such as 'Guided navigation', you will be incentivized to stay on the site to browse your favorite brands and also it makes it easier for you to explore some new brands/attributes/categories as well.
Please find below an example of guided navigation; here all the cameras are split into different categories and arranged by different attributes:
Similarly we can define categories and parameters for different products and services making it easier for consumers to reach the right product of their interest in as little time as possible.
Search is no longer just a box on your webpage; it is the way consumers search for information, get the information and browse sites. Navigation ease is a big factor to create that elusive 'Stickiness' quotient and Enterprise search plays a crucial role here.
Listed below are some of the Enterprise search best practices (not exhaustive) which can help your site in providing a better customer experience:
Ensuring these practices will help in providing a better search experience and will boost the stickiness of your website.
Some of the Features which you could include/ improve for your Website are given below:
These are just a few facets that you can improve upon, the list goes on. Start small and do not procrastinate on making changes. A better Customer experience through enterprise search can bring you huge additional traffic, stickiness, sales dollars and most importantly a goodwill which is very very hard to earn!
Happy searching!
