Search Workshop
Activate your team to collaboratively improve your enterprise search user experience.
Relevancy Audit and Tuning
Search experts analyze search technology and existing analytics to form data-driven recommendations and improve search results.
AI and Cognitive Search
Leverage advanced features like Natural Language Processing and Auto-tagging of content to improve search relevance.
Why is it so hard to make Enterprise Search work?
“Just make search results more relevant,” or “Make it work like Google” are common requests for EK’s enterprise search experts. But it’s important to remember that the criteria for successful search vary from person to person.
If a cashier in a store searches for “maternity leave policy” a successful result might be a direct link to the number of hours she has available for maternity leave and a mobile-accessible web form to request that leave quickly.
If an HR manager enters that same search for “maternity leave policy” a successful result might be a checklist of how to support employees in making this request.
To solve this difficult problem, EK’s enterprise search experts facilitate conversations with varied search stakeholders.
Search System Users
To meet the search needs of users, we need to understand their goals and the context from which they’re searching, as illustrated in the example above.
Knowledge Repository Owners
Content authors have unique insight into relationships between content, as well as the accuracy and importance of information.
Business Stakeholders
What if one particular search result generates more revenue for the organization – even if it’s not what system users would prioritize? Occasionally the needs of the business must be balanced against the needs of other stakeholders.
IT Professionals
Your organization’s IT professionals provide insight into your current technical ecosystem – a source of key information when EK’s search experts are optimizing your search solution.
How EK Can Help You Improve Enterprise Search
Enterprise Search Workshop
Our interactive, two to three-day search workshop can be customized to meet the specific needs of your organization, aligning IT professionals, business representatives, and system users around enterprise search solutions. EK’s search experts will:
- Empower all participants with the technical information to collaboratively design a best-in-class search solution;
- Facilitate conversations with knowledge repository owners to understand the unique challenges of integrating each repository into search;
- Discover business needs which may influence content relevance; and
- Facilitate a series of working sessions to discover the search needs of system users and collaboratively design a search user experience with them.
At the end of the workshop, EK consultants will produce a report documenting workshop findings, along with recommendations that can be used to quickly solve your organization’s highest priority search issues.
Relevancy Audit and Tuning
It’s not uncommon for system users to complain that “Search doesn’t work,” but it’s not always necessary to rebuild search from the ground up to fix the problem. Often, EK’s skilled search consultants can tweak your organization’s existing search platform to deliver an improved search experience. EK’s search experts will:
- Analyze the metadata and content in your various repositories to identify, enrich, and recommend search features to improve ranking signals;
- Identify search user interface (UI) elements which build user trust in search results;
- Improve your organization’s Enterprise Search Optimization (ESEO) strategy, implementation and governance;
- Improve your content metadata strategy, implementation, and governance; and
- Optimize search queries to improve system speed and performance.
Search Relevancy is one of the most common complaints I hear from our clients. Our audit process has helped organizations all over the world quickly improve the relevancy of their search results with minimal IT intervention. – Joe Hilger, COO Enterprise Knowledge
EK search experts will perform a search relevancy audit which blends qualitative and quantitative metrics before and after relevancy tuning, leveraging objective data to prove improved search results.
Enterprise Search Architecture and Implementation
If search relevancy tuning is not enough to solve your organization’s complex search problems, EK’s expert search consultants can help implement a new search solution on an updated platform. EK has the in-house capability to:
- Determine the business and technical search requirements with your organization’s IT professionals, knowledge repository owners, and search system users;
- Leverage our subject matter expertise about search technology to efficiently research prospective platforms;
- Identify the top enterprise search platforms which align with your organization’s business and technical requirements to enable your platform selection;
- Document the search system architecture and implementation roadmap for your chosen enterprise search platform and supporting technical stack; and
- Implement your organization’s enterprise search solution.
EK’s in house enterprise search architects and full-stack developers will help you rapidly develop your optimized enterprise search product, gather a blend of qualitative user experience research and search relevance data, and iteratively tune and refine your search user experience.
AI and Cognitive Search
No matter how great your enterprise search solution, search only “works” if the content is well-structured and your metadata is accurate. AI can be leveraged to more efficiently structure that unstructured content and to improve metadata accuracy – thereby making your content more searchable. EK’s capabilities in this area include:
- Auto-tagging systems to ensure your taxonomy tags are applied efficiently and accurately;
- Natural Language Processing (NLP) which allows search system users to enter a search query in their own words;
- Personalization and customization of search results based on what we already know about a particular user’s interests or preferences;
- Full-text extraction and semantic analysis which converts long documents into indexable content;
- Image processing which infers text from an image and translates that information into indexable information to increase search relevance; and
- Knowledge Panels which aggregate information about a search query from multiple sources to improve the overall search experience for your system users.
EK’s enterprise search architects and data scientists can help you design and develop knowledge graphs specific to your content and context. These custom knowledge graphs enable the structuring of unstructured information and lay the foundation for cognitive search.
"*" indicates required fields