In the digital age, access to information is critical. Whether in the workplace or at home, people are driven by a “right here right now” attitude when searching for any piece of information, so any delays or pieces of misinformation can be especially frustrating.
In particular, the workplace is usually a beehive of activity with constant exchanges of information. Team members expect to find the answers they need in the least amount of time possible so that they can focus on more value-adding tasks.
This is where enterprise search comes in.
What Is Enterprise Search?
Enterprise search is the practice of helping people find the information they need instantly from anywhere, in any format, inside your company. It could be from any source within the organization: document management systems, databases, intranet, file storage, or even active directories with employee data.
The enterprise search platform is a must-have for any organization as it brings the following benefits:
- Improves employee productivity
- Enables quick access to information leading to more precise decision making
- Enhances customer service
- Improves cost-effectiveness
- Improves employee onboarding as newcomers can access a wide range of information like training sessions and company policies to adapt faster
At Capacity, we’ve developed an unbeatable enterprise search technology that helps you and your team effortlessly search across all your company’s sources of information in just one interface. The best part is that we make everything accessible through an AI-powered chatbot that can seamlessly escalate to a live chat. You can ask anything like, “How many leads do I have?” and we’ll populate the information instantly.
Plus, to beef up security and ensure that only the defined people have access to company information, we use OAuth (open authorization) protocol to mirror the permissions of each person before granting access. That way, if someone requests a document or information they shouldn’t have access to, it will not be shared with them.
That being said, let’s now switch focus to enterprise search best practices. How do you ensure you’re optimizing and getting the most out of your enterprise search platform? Below are five best practices that you should implement:
1. Create a search support team.
If you’re serious about optimizing your organization’s enterprise search, then you know you can’t do it without an adept support team. Imagine going to search for a book in a library with no support team, let alone a catalog. Wouldn’t it take forever to find the book you’re looking for?
A search support team is like a bridge that connects your organization’s resource center with its users to optimize the enterprise search process. The team has a clear-cut characterization of search results with low engagement, popularity, and failures. They understand your organization’s resource center inside and out, so they can promptly identify any issues and devise an appropriate solution.
2. Define your business objectives.
Before customizing an enterprise search platform relevant to your specific organization, first you want to determine what you aim to accomplish. Creating precise goals and needs will come a long way in gathering the most accurate and relevant information in your enterprise search platform.
An instrumental technique when defining goals to develop an enterprise search engine is to make them public within the organization. You want to engage other stakeholders to pick their brains on any necessary additions or removals. You also want to get their buy-in.
3. Know your end-user characteristics.
It’s important to ensure that your knowledge base is relevant and helpful to the end-users. What do they aim to achieve or find when clicking on your platform? Do the search results contain comprehensive information about what they’re looking for? What is their searching behavior in terms of time and frequency?
The primary goal of the search platform is to enhance the user experience, and you should ensure it delivers on that role. If you notice certain areas where the users are dissatisfied with the results, you should mark them for immediate improvement.
4. Keep sensitive information secure.
Before making any piece of information searchable by the end-users, you must be positive that it won’t compromise your organization’s security posture. Remember, critical company data is one of the most targeted by hackers and could lead to costly expenses.
Capacity leverages the latest technology in machine learning and AI to ensure that only the right end-users can access the appropriate information sources.
5. Create multiple interfaces for information access.
A common mistake that most organizations make is limiting the information to only be accessible via company desktops. This practice is outdated and detrimental to productivity, considering that nowadays it’s a norm for people to work remotely.
Ensure that end users can access the organization’s enterprise search platform via laptops, tablets, or smartphones, not just the desktop computer. This will guarantee productivity and efficiency regardless of your team’s location or access device.
Conclusion.
Enterprise search is critical to providing users with solutions or results that would take ages to find manually. These top five best practices will revolutionize how you approach search within your organization for the benefit of overall workplace productivity and efficiency.
Have you developed a search engine platform for your organization yet? If not, don’t worry; we’re here to help. At Capacity, we leverage artificial intelligence to build a transparent platform where users can access critical information within a click of a few buttons. So don’t get left behind.