Accelerating Business Success with Intent-driven Search Interactions
The diverse way in which people express their needs requires that companies implement intelligent search and dynamic navigation capabilities that can capture and comprehend the customer's intent for his or her visit to a company's site. Understanding customer intent is multi-dimensional in nature and requires the ability to understand both a customer's immediate need, and infer in real time related secondary or tertiary needs. For example, a searcher who wants to know "which vehicles get the best mileage" might next logically inquire about potential fuel cost savings from buying a more efficient car. The ability to comprehend the complete depth of customer need—the customer's intent—is essential for addressing their most urgent requests immediately and intelligently anticipating related information needs. By implementing an ability to understand customer intent, companies can significantly improve their customers' online experience and accelerate customers' paths to success.
Match Enterprise Resources to Customer Intent for Each Interaction
The ability to comprehend customer intent provides companies with powerful capabilities to determine which enterprise resources are best equipped to address customer needs. All too often, companies overwhelm their customers with too much content that contains too little customer relevance. Understanding the intent behind each customer interaction enables companies to more efficiently focus their content management activities on customer-specific needs. Content, in this context, need not be limited to static information. Companies can also leverage an understanding of intent to determine if and when transactional systems and their related business processes should be exposed to customers. For example, if customer inquiries related to billing (e.g. disputes, balance inquiries, etc.) are a common customer need, then integrating search with the enterprise billing system is of critical importance in being able to adequately address customer needs. Matching enterprise resources to customer intent provides powerful dividends to all parties. Customers obtain easier, more efficient access to the content and data that address their specific needs, leading to greater satisfaction and desire to use the Web as their primary channel of interaction. Better alignment between content management and customer intent enables more effective use of existing content, eliminates the creation of redundant content, and extends the reach of transaction-based systems-of-record to provide customers with real-time access to critical information.
Businesses that succeed in matching enterprise resources to the real-time intent behind each unique customer interaction will create a distinct competitive advantage. Deployed properly, this ability to match enterprise resources with the real-time needs of customers can accelerate marketing and sales conversion paths, or problem resolution processes, creating value for both the visitor and the company whose site the customer is visiting.
Deliver an Intent-driven Personalized Experience for Each Customer Interaction
The ability to deliver a real-time, personalized experience that successfully addresses the needs of the visitor is the only true barometer for successful online customer interactions. Determining the customer's intent for a particular visit allows companies to understand the full extent of their customers' needs. Matching customer intent to enterprise content and data is critical for identifying the right information to address the customer's complete set of needs. The intent-driven experience enables companies to present a unified face to the customer—one where service, sales and business partners can present relevant solutions and offers specific to the context of a customer's need. By providing customers with real-time, personalized responses to their inquiries, companies are initiating a Web-based dialogue with their customers. Should customers need to perform additional research to achieve their objective for that visit, the personalized experience provides them with personalized navigation that can be used to guide customers to their desired information.
Customer intent-driven search provides companies with a powerful means of differentiating themselves in a crowded and confusing online market. By focusing on the needs of customers and delivering appropriate content and processes specific to those needs, companies can accelerate their time to value from every customer interaction.
InQuira (
www.inquira.com)improves the quality of customer interactions through websites and contact centers with integrated intelligent search, knowledge management and analytics applications. InQuira's solutions leverage patented intelligent search technology to understand a customer's intent in real time, and dynamically create a personalized response that incorporates the right information, data and links to applications from across an enterprise to meet that customer's need. InQuira's blue-chip customers include AT&T, Bank of America, Chrysler, BEA Systems, Fidelity Investments, Honda, Sovereign Bank and SunTrust.
The InQuira 7 suite of applications enables companies to provide customer-centric service, online and through assisted service channels, across marketing, sales, service and support business functions. More information is available at www.inquira.com.