Why search and Findability is critical for the customer experience and NPS on websites

Posted on April 23, 2013 by

To achieve a high NPS, Net Promoter Score, the customer experience (cx) is crucial and a critical factor behind a positive customer experience is the ease of doing business. For companies who interact with their customers through the web (which ought to be almost every company these days) this of course implies a need to have good Findability and search on the website in order for visitors to be able to find what they are looking for without effort.

The concept of NPS was created by Fred Reichheld and his colleagues of Bain and Co who had an increasing recognition that measuring customer satisfaction on its own wasn’t enough to make conclusions of customer loyalty. After some research together with Satmetrix they came up with a single question that they deemed to be the only relevant one for predicting business success “How likely are you to recommend company X to a friend or colleague.” Depending upon the answer to that single question, using a scale of 0 to 10, the respondent would be considered one of the following:

The Net Promoter Score model

The idea is that Promoters—the loyal, enthusiastic customers who love doing business with you—are worth far more to your company than passive customers or detractors. To obtain the actual NPS score the percentage of Detractors is deducted from the percentage of Promoters.

How the customer experience drives NPS

Several studies indicate four main drivers behind NPS:

Brand relationship
Experience of / satisfaction with product offerings (features; relevance; pricing)
Ease of doing business (simplicity; efficiency; reliability)
Touch point experience (the degree of warmth and understanding conveyed by front-line employees)

According to ‘voice of the customer’ research conducted by British customer experience consultancy Cape Consulting the ease of doing business and the touch point experience accounts for 60 % of the Net Promoter Score, with some variations between different industry sectors. Both factors are directly correlated to how easy it is for customers to find what they are looking for on the web and how easily front-line employees can find the right information to help and guide the customer.

Successful companies devote much attention to user experience on their website but when trying to figure out how most visitors will behave website owners tend to overlook the search function. Hence visitors who are unfamiliar with the design struggle to find the product or information they are looking for causing unnecessary frustration and quite possibly the customer/potential customer runs out of patience with the company.

Ideally, Findability on a company website or ecommerce site is a state where desired content is displayed immediately without any effort at all. Product recommendations based on the behavior of previous visitors is an example but it has limitations and requires a large set of data to be accurate. When a visitor has a very specific query, a long tail search, the accuracy becomes even more important because there will be no such thing as a close enough answer. Imagine a visitor to a logistics company website looking for information about delivery times from one city to another, an ecommerce site where the visitor has found the right product but wants to know the company’s return policy before making a purchase or a visitor to a hospital’s website looking for contact details to a specific department. Examples like these are situations where there is only one correct answer and failure to deliver that answer in a simple and reliable manner will negatively impact the customer experience and probably create a frustrated visitor who might leave the site and look at the competition instead.

Investing in search have positive impacts on NPS and the bottom line

Google has taught people how to search and what to expect from a search function. Step one is to create a user friendly search function on your website but then you must actively maintain the master data, business rules, relevance models and the zero-results hits to make sure the customer experience is aligned. Also, take a look at the keywords and phrases your visitors use when searching. This is useful business intelligence about your customers and it can also indicate what type of information you should highlight on your website. Achieving good Findability on your website requires more than just the right technology and modern website design. It is an ongoing process that successfully managed can have a huge impact on the customer experience and your NPS which means your investment in search will generate positive results on your bottom line.

Finding the right information requires finding the right talent

Posted on March 7, 2013 by

At Findwise we are experts in helping organizations setting up systems to find their corporate information and presenting it in every way imaginable. But we are not only good at finding the right information, we must also be good at finding the right people to come work for us.

The people working here are highly skilled consultants within different areas such as business consulting, information management, text analytics, user experience, system design etc. They all have two things in common; they were handpicked to work here because of their unique expertise and passion for search technology and they could all easily have chosen to work someplace else.

Our way of finding these people is based on the notion that talent attracts talent. That means in order to find new talented people we must make the ones who are already working here thrive and come to work each day filled with joy and anticipation. That creates the ripple effect we need to compete for talent with the giants of the IT industry.

How do we accomplish that? Well, talented people must be respected as equals and be given the freedom to create and innovate. You don’t hire a talent to tell him or her exactly how to do what they are talented at. That would be like hiring Michael Jackson and then telling him how to write a hit song. We want our talented people to feel encouraged to act independently and bravely, that is how their talents best are put to use for Findwise and our clients.

Within the corporate world today these are still surprisingly uncommon ideas and two of the major daily newspapers in Sweden have both written about our approach to management, an article in SvD last fall and one recently in Dagens Nyheter.

To summarize the news, Findwise approach to management is to continue to uphold an open, trusting environment with a flat corporate structure, in which flexible working hours, freedom and own responsibility are principal. »Use your own judgment« is the golden rule which encourages a fighting spirit and the desire to develop new ideas.

We gladly walk this talk. And it has paid off so far. We are now employing more than 90 people, have managed more than 700 client projects and have enjoyed steady and profitable growth since the start in 2005. We are well on our way towards becoming a world-leading enterprise in our field, and it is all thanks to the talented people who work here.

/Olof Belfrage

Predictive Analytics World 2012

Posted on January 18, 2013 by

At the end of November 2012 top predictive analytics experts, practitioners, authors and business thought leaders met in London at Predictive Analytics World conference. Cameral nature of the conference combined with great variety of experiences brought by over 60 attendees and speakers made a unique opportunity to dive into the topic from Findwise perspective.

Dive into Big Data

In the Opening Keynote, presented by Program Chairman PhD Geert Verstraeten, we could hear about ways to increase the impact of Predictive Analytics. Unsurprisingly a lot of fuzz is about embracing Big Data. As analysts have more and more data to process, their need for new tools is obvious. But business will cherish Big Data platforms only if it sees value behind it. Thus in my opinion before everything else that has impact on successful Big Data Analytics we should consider improving business-oriented communication. Even the most valuable data has no value if you can’t convince decision makers that it’s worth digging it.

But beeing able to clearly present benefits is not everything. Analysts must strive to create specific indicators and variables that are empirically measurable. Choose the right battles. As Gregory Piatetsky (data mining and predictive analytics expert) said: more data beats better algorithms, but better questions beat more data.

Finally, aim for impact. If you have a call center and want to persuade customers not to resign from your services, then it’s not wise just to call everyone. But it might also not be wise to call everyone you predict to have high risk of leaving. Even if as a result you loose less clients, there might be a large group of customers that will leave only because of the call. Such customers may also be predicted. And as you split high risk of leaving clients into “persuadable” ones and “touchy” ones, you are able to fully leverage your analytics potencial.

Find it exciting

Greatest thing about Predictive Analytics World 2012 was how diverse the presentations were. Many successful business cases from a large variety of domains and a lot of inspiring speeches makes it hard not to get at least a bit excited about Predictive Analytics.

From banking and financial scenarios, through sport training and performance prediction in rugby team (if you like at least one of: baseball, Predictive Analytics or Brad Pitt, I recommend you watch Moneyball movie). Not to mention Case Study about reducing youth unemployment in England. But there are two particular presentations I would like to say a word about.

First of them was a Case Study on Predicting Investor Behavior in First Social Media Sentiment-Based Hedge Fund presented by Alexander Farfuła – Chief Data Scientist at MarketPsy Capital LLC. I find it very interesting because it shows how powerful Big Data can be. By using massive amount of social media data (e.g. Twitter), they managed to predict a lot of global market behavior in certain industries. That is the essence of Big Data – harness large amount of small information chunks that are useless alone, to get useful Big Picture.

Second one was presented by Martine George – Head of Marketing Analytics & Research at BNP Paribas Fortis in Belgium. She had a really great presentation about developing and growing teams of predictive analysts. As the topic is brisk at Findwise and probably in every company interested in analytics and Big Data, I was pleased to learn so much and talk about it later on in person.

Big (Data) Picture

Day after the conference John Elder from Elder Research led an excellent workshop. What was really nice is that we’ve concentrated on the concepts not the equations. It was like a semester in one day – a big picture that can be digested into technical knowledge over time. But most valuable general conclusion was twofold:

Leverage – an incremental improvement will matter! When your turnover can be counted in millions of dollars even half percent of saving mean large additional revenue.
Low hanging fruit – there is lot to gain what nobody else has tried yet. That includes reaching for new kinds of data (text data, social media data) and daring to make use of it in a new, cool way with tools that weren’t there couple of years ago.

Plateau of Productivity

As a conclusion, I would say that Predictive Analytics has become a mature, one of the most useful disciplines on the market. As in the famous Gartner Hype, Predictive Analytics reached has reached the Plateau of Productivity. Though often ungrateful, requiring lots of resources, money and time, it can offer your company a successful future.

Tutorial: Optimising Your Content for Findability

Posted on November 6, 2012 by

This tutorial was done on the 6th of November at J. Boye 2012 conference in Aarhus Denmark. Tutorial was done by Kristian Norling.

Findability and Your Content

As the amount of content continues to increase, new approaches are required to provide good user experiences. Findability has been introduced as a new term among content strategists and information architects and is most easily explained as:

“A state where all information is findable and an approach to reaching that state.”

Search technology is readily used to make information findable, but as many have realized technology alone is unfortunately not enough. To achieve findability additional activities across several important dimensions such as business, user, information and organisation are needed.

Search engine optimisation is one aspect of findability and many of the principles from SEO works in a intranet or website search context. This is sometimes called Enterprise Search Engine Optimisation (ESEO). Getting findability to work well for your website or intranet is a difficult task, that needs continuos work. It requires stamina, persistence, endurance, patience and of course time and money (resources).

Tutorial Topics

In this tutorial you will take a deep dive into the many aspects of findability, with some good practices on how to improve findability:

Enterprise Search Engines vs Web Search
Governance
Organisation
User involvement
Optimise content for findability
Metadata
Search Analytics

Brief Outline

We will start some very brief theory and then use real examples and also talk about what organisations that are most satisfied with their findability do.

Experience level

Participants should have some intranet/website experience. A basic understanding of HTML, with some previous work with content management will make your tutorial experience even better. A bonus if you have done some Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for public websites.

Optimising Your Content for Findability from Findwise

Approaches for Building a Business Case for Enterprise Search

Posted on November 1, 2012 by

Approaches for Identifying Information Access Needs and to Build a Business Case for Enterprise Search and Findability

We have defined a number of alternative approaches to identify the need and value of search-driven findability to support an organisation or a specific process. In other words, different methods to build a business case for enterprise search in a specific organization or process.

Task oriented

Analysing information access needs in relation to specific work task within a business process (by utilizing e.g. the method developed by Byström/Strindberg or the Customer Carewords method).

Process oriented

Mapping the process flow of sequential and dependent (value-adding) activities and the related information access needs, Analysing the dependencies/accessibility of information systems in the different activities (e.g. by using some kind of Business Process Modeling, like the Astrakan-method).

Decision oriented

Identifying and analysing the decision points and the related information access needs within a process.

Risk oriented

Analysing situations within a process or for decision points where the right information was not available. Or even worse if there only was old and unvalid information available? What would have been the outcome of the situation if the desired/needed information had been available? How can we avoid for this scenario to be repeated? Inspired by Lynda Moulton at LWM Technology Services and Martin White of IntranetFocus.

Effect oriented

Determine the desired effects from search-driven findability and define measuring point to follow up the effects over time. Includes also identification of the related target groups/personas and their information access needs to be fulfilled for the effects to be reached (based on the InUse method and previous work at Ericsson (Case Study) and Forsmark (Case Study). An enhanced variant of this method is currently being developed in a project at Chalmers.

Our ambition is to use these methods to help organisations identify information access needs and findability barriers and to help motivate search investments. The analysis could for example be performed by our Findability Business Consultants as part of an in-depth findability review focusing on either an existing application or a specific business process.

Presentation: Enterprise Search – Simple, Complex and Powerful

Posted on September 28, 2012 by

Every second, more and more information is created and stored in various applications. corporate websites, intranets, SharePoint sites, document management systems, social platforms and many more – inside the firewall the growth of information is similar to that of the internet. However, even though major players on the web have shown that navigation can’t compete with search, the Enterprise Search and Findability Report shows that most organisations have only a small or even a non-existing budget for search.

Web Search and Enterprise Search

Web search engines like Google has made search look easy. For enterprise search, some vendors give promises of a magic box. Buy a search engine, plug it in and wait for the magic to happen! Imagine the disappointment when both search results and performance are poor and users can’t find what they are looking for…

When you start planning your enterprise search project you soon realize the complexity and challenge – how do you meet the expectations created by Google?

The Presentation

This presentation was originally presented at the joint NSW KM Forum and IIM September event in Sydney, Australia by Mattias Brunnert. It contains topics as:

Why search is important and how to measure success
Why Enterprise Search and Information Management should be friends
How to kick off your search program

Enterprise Search, Simple, Complex and Powerful from Findwise

Analyzing the Voice of Customers with Text Analytics

Posted on September 19, 2012 by

Understanding what your customer thinks about your company, your products and your service can be done in many different ways. Today companies regularly analyze sales statistics, customer surveys and conduct market analysis. But to get the whole picture of the voice of customer, we need to consider the information that is not captured in a structured way in databases or questionnaires.

I attended the Text Analytics Summit earlier this year in London and was introduced to several real-life implementations of how text analytics tools and techniques are used to analyze text in different ways. There were applications for text analytics within pharmaceutical industry, defense and intelligence as well as other industries, but most common at the conference were the case studies within customer analytics.

For a few years now, the social media space has boomed as platforms of all kinds of human interaction and communication, and analyzing this unstructured information found on Twitter and Facebook can give corporations deeper insight into how their customers experience their products and services. But there’s also plenty of text-based information within an organization, that holds valuable insights about their customers, for instance notes being taken in customer service centers, as well as emails sent from customers. By combining both social media information with the internally available information, a company can get a more detailed understanding of their customers.

In its most basic form, the text analytics tools can analyze how different products are perceived in different customer groups. With sentiment analysis a marketing or product development department can understand if the products are retrieved in a positive, negative or just neutral manner. But the analysis could also be combined with other data, such as marketing campaign data, where traditional structured analysis would be combined with the textual analysis.

At the text analytics conference, several exciting solutions where presented, for example an European telecom company that used voice of customer analysis to listen in on the customer ‘buzz’ about their broadband internet services, and would get early warnings when customers where annoyed with the performance of the service, before customers started phoning the customer service. This analysis had become a part of the Quality of Service work at the company.

With the emergence of social media, and where more and more communication is done digitally, the tools and techniques for text analytics has improved and we now start to see very real business cases outside the universities. This is very promising for the adaptation of text analytics within the commercial industries.

Presentation: The Why and How of Findability

Posted on September 10, 2012 by

“The Why and How of Findability” presented by Kristian Norling at the ScanJour Kundeseminar in Copenhagen, 6 September 2012. We can make information findable with good metadata. The metadata makes it possible to create browsable, structured and highly findable information. We can make findability (and enterprise search) better by looking at findability in five different dimensions.

Five dimensions of Findability

1. BUSINESS – Build solutions to support your business processes and goals

2. INFORMATION – Prepare information to make it findable

3. USERS – Build usable solutions based on user needs

4. ORGANISATION – Govern and improve your solution over time

5. SEARCH TECHNOLOGY – Build solutions based on state-of-the-art search technology

The Why and How of Findability from Findwise

People, Topics and Information Flow Key for Findability

Posted on August 20, 2012 by

Understanding and utilizing the context of both people and topic (subject) is the future of enterprise search and findability. As we have seen the last few years, the amount of information that is created within organisations and elsewhere is growing exponentially. This makes it harder, day-by-day, to find the information that is relevant at any given moment. By organizing information based on topic, by using text analytics, better metadata, adding user tagging, sentiment analysis etc. it is possible to make findability better. A few examples are mentioned in this blog post series on information flow from 2010. The whole point of findability boils down to improving the information flow and access at any given time. Example on Information Flow from the Intranet of Region Västra Götaland.

In order to make sense of any arbitrary information we as humans usually need the help of someone familiar with the topic to help us makes sense of it and understand it. By both addressing the challenge of finding people with the right knowledge and finding the right information, we can contextually make the information more relevant and easier to find.

For example by doing search analytics and looking at usage patterns in general or by looking at how people with the same usage (search) patterns are going about finding information, we can give better suggestions. Also, recommendations of information produced or liked by people who are like you have a better chance of being relevant to you. By using Social Network Analysis, we should be able to find patterns in what information is in demand and how the informations flows. The analysis can of course also be used to find the supernodes, meaning the people through which information and connections flow. For example, email is a under-utilized source of information flow, knowledge, context and social network analysis.

On the 28th of August, at the World Café in Oslo, Kristian Norling will talk about findability and collaboration, with a focus on people and topic centric solutions. Examples from Region Västra Götaland and other projects will be made.

The Enterprise Search and Findability Report 2012 is ready

Posted on July 6, 2012 by

No strategy, no budget, no resources. This is the common scenario for enterprise search and findability in many organisations today. Still Enterprise Search is considered a critical success factor in 75% of organisations that responded to the global survey that ran from March to May this year.

The Enterprise Search and Findability Report 2012 is now ready for download.

The Enterprise Search and Findability report 2012 shows that 60% of the respondents expressed that it is very/moderately hard to find the right information. Only 11% stated that it is fairly easy to search for information and as few as 3% consider it very easy to find the desirable information. This shows that there still is a large untapped potential for any organisation to get great value from investing in enterprise search. For a relatively small investment, preferably in personnel it is possible to make search a lot better. The survey also reveals that organisations who are very satisfied with their search, have a (larger) budget, more resources and systematically work with analysing search.

Figure. What is your primary goal for utilising search technology in your organisation?

The primary goal for using search is to accelerate retrieval of known information sources, 91%, and to improve the re-use of content (information/knowledge), 72%. This indicates that often search within organisations is used as a discovery tool for what already is known. If looking over the next three years, as many as 77% think that the amount of information in the organisation will increase. This means that every year it will be even more important be able to find the right information and that means Enterprise search is still very much needed, as stated in the following great presentations (on video): Why Business Success Depends on Enterprise Search (by Martin White of Intranet Focus) and The Enterprise Search Market – What should be on your radar? (by Alan Pelz-Sharpe of 451 Research)

Download the full report.

The Findability blog

the enterprise search and findability blog by Tietoevry Findwise

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