Insight engines are proving to be a game-changer for customer support

As customer and employee expectations for relevance evolve, so must your support organization’s strategy for making content accessible. With the growing amount of content being created, both within your repositories, as well as on external sites, siloed search and even federated search solutions are becoming obsolete.

To remain relevant and competitive, companies are becoming much more customer-centric and are quickly realizing that they must understand their customers’ needs and fulfill them better than anyone else. As a result, it is becoming apparent that merely controlling content is not cutting it, as there is a great discrepancy in the information that’s available and the information that’s needed. Instead, they are seeking ways to create, find, use, share, analyze and transform their collective knowledge to provide a more relevant customer support experience.

Insight engines make this possible. An insight engine goes beyond the traditional scope of enterprise search by understanding an organization’s data, giving it context and transforming it into insights that deliver value for customers and employees. Gartner explains, “Insight engines apply relevancy methods to describe, discover, organize and analyze data. This allows existing or synthesized information to be delivered proactively or interactively, and in the context of digital workers, customers or constituents at timely business moments”.

Download a complimentary copy of the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines:

While insight engines are growing increasingly more popular, they have been top of mind for innovation leaders over the last year or so. Kantar Vermeer, a global marketing consultancy, led a global market-research study called Insights2020 (i2020), that includes interviews and surveys of more than 10,000 business practitioners worldwide. From that study, they learned that the single most important tool that is contributing to customer-centric growth, is a company’s insights engine.

Why are insights so important? As IDM explains, insights offer “a non-obvious understanding about your customers, which if acted upon, has the potential to change their behaviour for mutual benefit.” In other words, insights are empowering companies to make informed decisions based on what their customers want and need, and as a result – are enhancing their overall support strategy in three key ways:

1. Improving customer experience. With AI-powered search, insight engines deliver intelligent customer support experiences by understanding customers’ natural-language, as opposed to relying on a specific search term they may not be familiar with. Machine learning capabilities enhance the relevance of the experience even further by bringing context into the equation. Contextualization is refined by receiving additional contextual inputs at the point of the search query or related behavior. These in-context inputs trigger automatic queries or inject additional relevance clues to a search, to further tune the results and optimize the customer customer experience. Offering a relevant and contextual experience drives on-site interaction, self-service success and case deflection. Watch how Salesforce and VMware increased self-service success and achieved their business goals with Coveo AI-powered search.

1. Increasing agent engagement. Total search is an essential element of insight engines. Unifying information, across an entire ecosystem of record, regardless of what kind of data source it is, not only enables customers to self-serve but it increases agent engagement as well. As known issues are resolved via self-service channels, agents get to regularly work on new and more challenging tasks. Unlocking relevant and contextual information and making it accessible to agents empowers them to do more on their own, increases proficiency, lowers staff turnover and ultimately improves net promoter scores, customer effort scores and overall customer satisfaction.

1. Making use of big data. Companies have access to more data about their customers than ever before, yet the customer journey is still a black hole for many. Insight engines ensure companies are no longer in the dark by providing a line-of-sight into content gaps, knowledge usage patterns and relevant trends. This visibility is enabling companies to understand their community and offer a proactive experience. Proactive search is contextual to each user’s unique situation and circumstance. The relevance of results is automatically tuned in real time and ensure the right content is delivered at the right time.

Investing in a standard search solution will deliver subpar results. AI-powered search is infused with relevant and contextual insights, which is where to the true value is. For a deeper understanding of intelligent insights and to learn which insight engine is most suitable to meet the needs of your organization, download a complimentary copy of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines Report.