Accelerating Business Success with Intent-driven Search Interactions

In today's hyper-competitive business environment, companies work hard to differentiate themselves and provide greater value to their customers. Despite numerous investments in Web content and customer relationship management (CRM) technologies, companies continue to struggle with transitioning their customers to lower-cost interaction channels. Businesses often fail to maximize their marketing and sales conversion opportunities due to complex, customer-facing websites that overwhelm users with too much information that bears little relevancy to customers' specific needs. Across industries, companies struggle to deliver Web self- service options to consumers who would rather not visit the store or dial into the toll-free support line. Marketing and service organizations are beginning to realize that they cannot deliver a successful one-to-one real-time customer experience on the Web without an inherent ability to first understand the customer's purpose or intent for that specific visit. Nothing accelerates the path to value more than capturing and understanding what your customers want to accomplish in the next five minutes, and delivering a relevant and personalized experience that makes it possible for them to achieve their objectives. Intelligent search is the enabler for exactly that type of experience.

Companies lack neither the knowledge of their customers nor the content required to address their needs. What companies lack is the ability to put their wealth of resources into action for the mutual benefit of themselves and their customers. The unfortunate consequence is that—despite the best of intentions—most companies are unable to provide their customers with a real-time, customer-centric user experience that enables customers to be successful online. This lack of success on the Web often leads to customer attrition, lost revenues and increased customer acquisition and service costs. Companies recognize they have a critical need to simplify and personalize the user experience on their websites so that customers can successfully find information that address their needs in real time.

Delivering a personalized and effective real-time customer experience requires that companies adopt a new set of best practices for successfully engaging their customers online. These best practices include:

• Understanding the customer's intent for each online interaction;
• Matching the right enterprise resources to the customer's objectives for each specific interaction; and
• Delivering an intent-driven personalized experience for each customer interaction.
  

By implementing these best practices, companies can successfully accelerate their time to value from critical online customer interactions—accelerating, for instance, conversion paths that generate revenue and customer self-service processes that resolve problems.

Understand the Customer's Intent for Each Online Interaction
People go online to satisfy a wide range of needs, and behavior may vary depending on what it is the visitor is trying to accomplish. This is one of the key reasons it is so challenging to create a navigation-based Web experience that meets the needs of all customers. When customers attempt to use the search facilities of a company's website to overcome the inherent limitations of a website's standard navigation, they typically try one of two approaches. Either they will guess at how to articulate their needs in two or three words, hoping the search returns the information they need, but not really believing it will; or they explicitly express their needs much as they would in conversation.

With traditional keyword-based search engines, both approaches carry risks for the searcher—the first will likely return a long list of results that may or may not contain the needed information. The searcher often does not know until he clicks through one or more of the results. The latter approach will return even more results, and it is unlikely they will be relevant to the searcher's natural language query. In reality, few people characterize their problems, needs or objectives in exactly the same way, so businesses respond by designing customer experiences around the information or questions they deem to be most appropriate for their largest segments of site visitors. Automobile manufacturers structure their websites by model, which, by design, assumes visitors already know which vehicles they want to research.

Many customer support sites direct visitors to a list of top FAQs, hoping that the information contained therein will be a close enough approximation to what the visitor actually needs. The operating assumption is that you design the website experience around the largest segment of visitors—in our examples, the shoppers who already know which vehicle they want to research, or the customers experiencing a common problem. Neither approach addresses the needs of the few—those individuals with unique needs that fall outside the boundaries of the business' targeted segments. Taken in their aggregate, the "few" will generally represent a larger visitor population than a company's targeted segments. Amazon and eBay have created new business models leveraging the interconnected nature of the Internet to create markets for "the few." Yet most companies have not applied those same lessons to their own sites. The underserved visitors represent lost revenue opportunities, and arguably—because they are unable to resolve their specific support needs online—the greatest consumers of expensive CSR expertise.