With the rapid rate of change in the global economy, the need for customer knowledge and predictive insight has never been more urgent. The competition is increasing as well as the demand for cost reduction, so whether you are a company fighting for business or a public entity serving the citizens, there is a great deal to gain by introducing Findability on your website.

Using the power of an enterprise search platform to serve your Internet site enables you to take your online service offering to the next level. Due to the “Google-effect”, users have become used to accessing information via a single search box as opposed to “surfing around” to find what they are looking for. A good search system enables your site users to start their journey through your site from the single search box. Accompanied by extreme relevance and navigational tools, users find the information they are looking for with a minimum number of clicks.
Online presence has become a must for companies with a large customer base. With consumers constantly developing a higher degree of online literacy, they expect a higher degree of online service from their vendors— including easy-to-find information and other services such as stock trading and banking facilities. You can easily offer your customers a unified view on your services and information—even if they originate from different source systems—due to the search system’s ability to act as a universal Findability layer.

An increased online service offering will also drive self-service behavior from the user side. By using Search Analytics on the query/search logs you will get a wealth of information about customer behavior. Take customer support as an example. By publishing the most requested support information on your public site, and enabling the users to easily find the information they are looking for, the need for call center support is lowered. This reduces the pressure on the basic customer service functions, allowing you to refocus resources to other value creating activities.

For many enterprises, self service is seen as the solution that can provide customers with the support they need while significantly reducing service costs.

Self-service is regarded as an opportunity to sharply lower customer support costs by deflecting calls. For example, respondents to a Fortune 1,000 survey expect to offload 23% of their call volume to Internet-based self-service (Mastering Online Customer Service, Bruce D. Temkin, Bob Chatham, Hillary Drohan, Katharine M. Gardiner, Forrester, July 2002). And there are proven cost justifications for implementing self-service: Web-based self-service interactions cost 75% less than a phone interaction.

While more traditional customer service interaction solutions tend to be based on a knowledge data base, that needs to be built and maintained, a Findability based solution is more dynamic in its nature and is based on a dynamical index created by the already existing data that resides in the corporate systems. The index can be partitioned into information buckets meeting different user needs and profiles.
So implement Findability in your customer service interactions!