Blog post courtesy of Louis Têtu, Chairman and CEO, Coveo
What differentiates traditional search from an intelligent, responsive search experience?
That very question was core to the evaluations of vendors in The Forrester Wave™: Cognitive Search and Knowledge Discovery Solutions, Q2 2017. Forrester defines Cognitive search as:
“The new generation of enterprise search solutions that employ AI technologies such as natural language processing and machine learning to ingest, understand, organize, and query digital content from multiple data sources”.
We are humbled and honoured to be named a leader and to be top-ranked for strategy in the Forrester Wave™ report. The report evaluated 9 vendors on 23 criteria, grouped by Current Offering, Strategy and Market Presence. The Forrester Wave™ report positioning is dependent on Forrester’s evaluation of the vendor’s market presence, strategy, and current offering in regards to Cognitive search. To be considered for inclusion in the report, vendors must have a comprehensive, differentiated cognitive search solution, that is not technologically embedded in any particular applications.
Enterprise Search to Cognitive Search
What about Coveo embodies the evolution from enterprise search to cognitive search? The ability to deliver relevant content, in context, at scale. Our platform was evaluated on its ability to automatically learn and deliver what is most relevant to each user, in context. Forrester found that search was successful when the results were relevant to the person querying them and specifically highlighted our research and development efforts on their scorecard.
Each time our R&D team makes a decision that moves our product forward, it’s with relevance in mind. The result is a cognitive search technology that goes far beyond keyword identification, and instead is able to validate who the user is from gathering data from background data sources, and then applying technology like term detection to immediately determine what the user is looking for. We believe Coveo’s deep integration with Salesforce as well as our ability to get customers up and running quickly in the cloud, has greatly contributed to our placement in the Forrester Wave™. Logitech is an excellent example of how we are able deliver this to our customers. Logitech’s support community is the hub where its customers can go for answers, knowledge and discussion. All of their self-service resources are accessible through that single site. With the help of Coveo, Logitech has successfully improved its case deflection rate by 30%.
Our success in providing context-relevant search for self-service product support for technology companies such as Adobe and Salesforce was also recognized. The applications cognitive search capabilities have on a business’s bottom line are varied and far reaching, from increased conversion rates on your online properties to increasing collaboration amongst your employees to improving the experiences your customers have online.
Cognitive Search Improves the Self-Service Experience
This capability delivers real business benefits when applied to improving customer self-service. The information needed to run a well-oiled self-serve community is often created, shared and stored across a variety of different sources and formats – a perfect opportunity for cognitive search. Whether companies just want to redirect customers to the most salient information, articles or community posts; or actively drive increased case deflection, relevant content in the context of the customers is essential. Using Coveo, Watchguard, a leading provider of UTM and firewall hardware more than doubled their case deflection rate in under four months.
Cognitive Search Increases Conversion Rates
Personalization is now the expected baseline by anyone engaging with your website or intranet. Take a moment to visualize your own experience with online shopping. When you land on a website that you’ve visited before, the expectation is that the site will remember items you had put in your shopping cart previously, or are hoping they will suggest similar sources to what you were looking for.
We are committed to bringing the same level of personalization internally, on intranets and portals, as well as externally on public-facing websites. By using additional data sources, such as stored visitor profiles, when a visitor arrives at a website using Coveo Search we can identify key traits such as their job title and suggest articles or documents they will find relevant.
Coveo’s term detection capability helps elevates Coveo from enterprise to cognitive search.
Traditional keyword search would look at a term such as “Coveo for Salesforce Release Notes” and see that as 4 separate keywords. Coveo can pull from our organization’s master corpus and look at “Coveo for Salesforce Release Notes” as one term, as well as also noticing there is a major version (V2) and a minor version (29), meaning that there could be specific documents depending on the version we are after. Furthermore, the technology is simultaneously incorporating knowledge of the user searching to ensure they are delivering the right document. That’s personalized relevance.
Cognitive Search Increases Collaboration
We’ve all been there, you’ve just spent two days working on a project to only discover a file that would have saved you tons of time if you’d only discovered it sooner. As companies grow, the number of places they store information grow to. Enterprise companies storing information in multiple areas without the proper mechanisms in-place for interdepartmental knowledge sharing are already losing out. Cognitive search fosters scalable collaboration because it opens up access to your company’s collective knowledge: it leverages the insight of your workforce and applies it across your organization. Coveo’s technology does this by gathering background data on who the user is, what they are searching for, learns what has helped other employees with similar queries, and suggests the most relevant answers. This not only saves time and eliminates confusion, but it increases the level of collaboration your employees are able to achieve by providing them with the most relevant information for the task at hand. As your employees proficiency rises as a result of more efficient knowledge sharing, so will your employee retention rates.
Understanding where your organization sits on Coveo’s Relevance Maturity Model is the first step toward injecting relevance into your business. To learn more, watch our explainer video here or read our complimentary ebook.
For more details on AI-powered search solutions for your business, visit coveo.com.