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5 benefits of enterprise search
With a proper enterprise search strategy in place, organizations can improve their employees' efficiency and ensure customers have positive experiences.
In the digital era, where information is both a tool and an asset, organizations are inundated with data. This deluge, while potentially valuable, can be overwhelming.
Enterprise search can help parse through data across multiple content management repositories to help users discover and use the organization's content. If implemented correctly, search can be a strategic tool to enhance productivity, manage data and drive business growth.
What is enterprise search?
Enterprise search is a suite of technologies that help users discover relevant content across various data sources within an organization, including emails, chats, documents, databases, internal wikis and intranets. Overall, an enterprise search strategy can make information retrieval quicker, more accurate and more intuitive. Limited only by the user's permission level, enterprise search should enable all parts of a business, from sales and marketing, engineering and IT, legal and compliance to supply chains.
Enterprise search is a cornerstone of modern content management strategies, employing machine learning (ML), AI and human oversight to refine and improve search results. It transcends traditional search methods, as it can integrate data sources and formats, which can benefit knowledge management, information discovery, compliance and collaboration toolkits.
Benefits of enterprise search software
With the right enterprise search software, organizations can benefit full departments, individual employees and the business as a whole.
1. Enhances productivity
Employees spend a significant portion of their days searching for information. Enterprise search tools can cut down this time as they offer rapid, relevant search results, which can also reduce employees' frustration with their tools. So, enterprise search improves job satisfaction while enabling employees to focus on their core tasks.
2. Improves data management
With enterprise search, organizations gain a bird's-eye view of their data landscape. This can help them better categorize and organize information, turning a scattered array of data into a well-structured repository.
This management is critical for e-commerce and B2B companies, in particular, as they manage a vast amount of product data. This data should only vary if it needs to, not because someone couldn't find the company datasheet and made some guesses. Improved search means improved access to correct information, reduced duplication and reduced creation of incorrect data.
3. Facilitates knowledge sharing and collaboration
In large organizations, siloed information can be a significant barrier to productivity and quality. Enterprise search breaks down these silos and makes information accessible across departments. This transparency fosters more collaboration and knowledge sharing among employees, which is crucial for innovation, problem-solving, consistency and work quality.
4. Enhances customer experience (CX) and informs business strategy
For businesses with an online presence, efficient search can be a game-changer. It enables customers to find what they need quickly, which in turn improves their overall experience and can lead to increased customer loyalty and sales.
The insights gleaned from search query data can also help businesses. A public-facing, permissions-based view into enterprise search gives customers better access to data that can drive their success, rather than having them query the sales and support sites separately.
Additionally, an enterprise search environment can gather usage information that can help organizations analyze what employees or customers search for, allowing them to identify and act on trends, gaps in content or services and areas for improvement. This approach can help guide strategic decisions and help businesses stay ahead of the curve.
5. Uses AI and ML for better results
Modern enterprise search tools can incorporate AI and ML to continuously improve search outcomes. These technologies understand context, learn from user behavior and can anticipate needs, making the search experience more intuitive and efficiently improving satisfaction and productivity for employees and customers.
The future of enterprise search
The benefits of enterprise search can touch every part of an organization and its clients, and it's more than just finding information. It is also about unlocking data's potential to drive business success.
Enterprise search is a key player in digital transformation, too. It enhances employee productivity, improves data management and elevates CX. By harnessing the power of AI and ML, enterprise search can better navigate the complex information landscape of the modern enterprise. In the long run, AI technologies like this could make searching obsolete, as content finds users, not the other way around.
Organizations without enterprise search strategies likely have complex suites of siloed content management systems with separate search engines, rules, synonyms and logins. With a proper strategy, organizations can gain a suite of tools that share a single search portal, which grows in its understanding of content and users. This enables an organization to change a pain point into a positive experience.
The information revolution is coming into its own with the convergence of enterprise search and AI. To take part in the value that AI will bring, organizations need an enterprise search platform that AI can further optimize for the benefit of employees, customers and partners.
Jordan Jones is a writer versed in enterprise content management, component content management, web content management and video-on-demand technologies.
