Today’s Search: All The Power. No Pain.
One of the world's largest information technology (IT) management software companies, CA, www.ca.com/us (NYSE: CA), unifies and simplifies the management of enterprisewide IT. Founded in 1976, CA today is a global company with headquarters in Islandia, NY, and 150 offices in 64 countries. With more than 5,300 developers, CA serves more than 99% of the Fortune 1000 companies, as well as government entities, educational institutions and thousands of other companies in diverse industries around the world.
CA has five main business groups, including 26 product solution sets and more than 1,000 products. CA’s technical support team is responsible for assisting and answering all of the technical questions received from more than 190,000 CA customers. In an effort to improve customer support, the technical support team wanted to help customers solve their problems easily on their own with CA’s online information. For customers with more difficult questions, CA’s technical support team needed to improve the speed and accuracy of the data it provided in the most efficient manner.
Access to the right information was a critical component to the success of these technical support improvements. To have all the data necessary to effectively respond to customer needs, the technical support team required a single point of access to all the pertinent information from CA’s support, services and development organizations, as well as from the partners. Adding to the fact that this information resided in multiple repositories and in a wide variety of geographical locations around the world, the technology used within each of these four information "towers" ranged from older Web servers that nobody wanted to modify, to newer applications, such as Microsoft SharePoint. The data came in formats such as Web, documents, databases, etc.
As part of a knowledge management initiative, CA evaluated three enterprise search solutions, including Coveo Enterprise Search. The evaluation was based on ease of installation; time needed to learn how to build interfaces and put the server up; and the ability to easily manipulate the user interface. Also of importance to CA during the review process was the relevance of the search results and the time to search and load the results set from over 2.5 million documents in a wide variety of formats and data sources.
Coveo Enterprise Search loaded CA’s data directly and was up and running within a week after installation with zero training. Sam Detweiler, VP technical support at CA, said, "Everything that we did during the installation was guided by online help and the documentation on Coveo’s support site, which is limited...but that’s because you really don’t need it. In six hours we had 1.6 million documents loaded from our database into the search engine."
Through a simple XML configuration file, CA can define how the documents in the search results look, and what pieces of data in them are highlighted in the body of the document (as compared to the metadata around the body).
"In addition to letting me refine the data results by date, document type and by author, the configuration panel in the search solution allows me to easily add additional metadata, including customers, customer locations, our products and the operation systems they run on with a couple of clicks. Inside of a half-hour, not only did I have all the data available to my users, but I was able to drill-down into the data without having to know anything about the data format, and without having to learn any special search keywords," said Detweiler.
"Previously, when someone asked us for distribution of our issues by year, or for the names of the top 20 customers who have had problems in a certain location, we’d have to go run a time-consuming database query report. Now, this information is included as part of our results set every time we search, without any extra work. It’s just there."
Unexpected Benefits
Another unexpected feature that pleased Detweiler was the ability to export search data to Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. By changing a small configuration file on the server, he is able to pull specific search results information about CA’s customers and easily export it into Excel, allowing other technical support team members to sort the data as they wish and to print it off in a hardcopy.
"There were no programming or fancy style sheets. If you can click a few words into an entry field, you can do the configuration," concluded Detweiler.
Having completed the evaluation of the new search solution for technical support, Detweiler had people from other departments, such as facilities and asset management, lined up at his door, asking him to get their data included into the search engine as well. Today, Coveo Enterprise Search is powering CA’s technical support, as well as the corporate Intranet search capabilities. It is also regularly used as a reporting tool, which is far beyond what it was initially evaluated for.
Coveo is driving a market that is considered a gatekeeper to unleashing business success. With a business initiative focused on improved customer experience through collaboration, Coveo’s search technology delivers proven organizational efficiencies for knowledge management, risk management, IP protection and compliance.
Coveo’s enterprise search solutions empower enterprises to securely access critical information as needed. For more information, and to test drive Coveo Enterprise Search free for 30 days, please visit www.coveo.com.