The Role of Enterprise Search in B2B Online Communities

The-Role-Of-Enterprise-Search-In-B2B-Online-Communities

According to HBR, 81% of customers prefer self-solving their issues before reaching out to a support representative. Gartner predicts that by 2020, customers will manage 85% of the relationship with an enterprise without interacting with a human. That’s a clear indicator that customers love self-service, which is good for businesses because it means higher customer satisfaction at reduced support cost.

Now, the question is “how do you empower your customers to self-serve?” And the answer is a powerful enterprise search solution.

Why Community Search?

Your customer community may have well-categorized discussion boards and a well-managed knowledge base, but there’s a reason you cannot ignore a good search.

Google has inculcated in everyone the habit of using search to find the information and answers to any queries they may have. And that’s what your customers expect from your customer community as well.

They lack the patience to check each and every document that shows up in search results, and even the time to manually navigate the community. If your community search is failing to provide relevant results in a split second, you are not leveraging the power of your community and information assets to the fullest. Constructive search ensures that a customer finds what he/she is looking for and doesn’t need to log a ticket or a case.

Why Enterprise Search?

You know the information your customers seek to self-serve is not always stored in a single repository or knowledge base. Rather, it resides across a variety of databases and platforms. For instance, your community knowledge base may be in Salesforce Community Cloud, your product team may be writing documentation in MadCap, and your training modules may have been created in Cornerstone or Articulate Storyline. If your community users are visiting your community to resolve their queries, they may not find all the answers there unless you’ve integrated all the information sources and made the information easily accessible.

The most effective way to make all the information residing at multiple places easily accessible is an enterprise search solution. Advanced enterprise search solutions integrate multiple content sources and bring relevant information across all sources – ranging from knowledge base to forum to external websites – to a single point of search and serve contextual information to your customers right when they need it.

Conclusion

Enterprise Search solutions are as easy to implement as they are to use. Having an intelligent search solution on your community ensures you highly relevant, boosted, usage-specific results that go far beyond the basic community search results. They make it a lot easy to ensure that all your enterprise information is available for your customers in a structured and secured manner.

Want to improve the search experience of your community users? Try SearchUnify.

Grazitti Interactive’s SearchUnify is an AI-based enterprise search solution that securely integrates all your information assets and delivers relevant search results to your community users. Fill out the form to get a free demo of SearchUnify or write to us at info@searchunify.com for more details.