Exalead Blog - The blog of Exalead

A quick shout out to Tracey Skinner of  Waterfield Technologies who was kind enough to spend some evening time discussing her thoughts and experiences around Customer Service, and in particular Self Service.  Following discussions with Exalead customers and trudging through countless articles and reports on the topic, it was interesting to get the insights from someone who provides integration services and customer service solutions to clients of all industries and sizes.

First, I wanted to get an insiders perspective on the state of adoption of new software technologies.  “We’re not seeing a lot of companies making expenditures on new suites or replacement technologies versus making what they have better.”  Tracy went on to echo what we’re hearing from Exalead customers:  call centers are filled with archaic legacy systems that don’t talk with each other and their current big challenge is to tie all these systems together in cost efficient ways to improve the effectiveness of their communications with and services for their customers.  Budgets are so tight that companies are being more creative than ever to get existing systems to work better.  “It requires a compelling ROI pitch in order to bring in technologies that require licensing.”

With respect to the state of self-service, Tracy said Waterfield is seeing a dramatic increase in the interest for self-service portals with many clients either discussing, in process, or evaluating solutions. However the implementation of self-service portals and the like is impeded by economics.   Despite this, Tracy is hearing, from her clients, a strong resolve to make advances in 2010.  This is encouraging to hear, but it seems the previously sited data integration challenges could directly impact the quality and effectiveness of a self-service solution.   Tracy admits she is not sure people fully understand the impact of data integration and need to look at fundamentals first before slapping a web UI on-top.  “When IT starts drilling in, they begin understanding other expenditures and tend to bock.”

Given Exalead’s own experiences, a search-based approach can be used to address the customer service data integration challenges while providing a compelling ROI.  With this approach, a search engine indexes content from any source(s) desired:  databases, file servers, content management systems, email servers, the Web, etc.  Whatever the number or type of resources indexed, the result is a single structured data layer that can be directly queried by users, or tapped by other applications using standard Web formats and protocols.  This eliminates costly and complicated integrations on the backend, providing unified access for all Customer Service reps and customers to all the appropriate structured and unstructured data inside and outside the firewall regardless of the source.

Beyond the integration of information, the search-based approach provides other advantages, further improving the success and effectiveness of a self-service solution.  More on that in the future.

Exalead Smart Search for Travel And Leisure solutions

Frommer’s 2009¹ online travel experience survey states that “half of all travelers have struggled with poorly constructed, confusing and inaccurate websites that don’t provide them with sufficient images and information. The survey also showed that consumers were frustrated by technology-related issues such as slow downloads and broken links.”

Obviously, there is a lot of work to do making consumer’s online travel booking experiences better.

At Exalead, we see this as an opportunity for search based applications.

Imagine if, instead of using a cumbersome search form, you could simply type “New York Giants January Home Game” and the search returned game ticket offers, associated promotions and advertising for travel, accommodations, dining and other relevant attractions.

Another example, imagine if in the early stages of planning a scuba diving trip to Mexico, a search allowed you to see the best deals for scuba across many different Mexican resorts. In less than a second, Exalead creates navigational categories for the user to look at additional offers such as hotels that offer scuba certification, hotels that take kids, boat rentals, restaurant deals, spa packages, city guides or resort info.

This would significantly improve the consumer’s experience at the same time add revenue for travel sites.

With Exalead’s Smart Search for Travel and Leisure solution, travel sites can present personalized, relevant ad placement that align with a user’s stated profile as well as their site behavior. This improves conversion revenue, ad click- through revenue and helps differentiate a travel site over its competitors.

How?

• Smart Search uses a user’s stated profile as well as relevant travel preferences through observing their behavior using Exalead’s Smart Search semantic processing and  relevance profiling technology.
• Smart Search processes, profiles and presents relevant promotions, advertisements, supporting information and social network content by interpreting user profiles, user queries and web page views.

At Exalead, we believe activity-centered travel arrangements will be a major step forward in making researching and booking travel online much less frustrating.

For those of you who will be attending the PhocusWright Travel Innovation Summit November 17 in Orlando, please come by and see our demo!

It’s been an interesting week further exploring the topic of Social Networking and Customer Service. Having a background in database, BI and now search technologies, I have been through my fair share of hype cycles, so am working on getting a better sense of the current state of the application and technology space. It is little surprise that Gartner places Social CRM: Customer Service at the peak of the hype cycle for Social Software (2009) with 2 to 5 years lead time to mainstream adoption and the related Social CRM: Community Marketing as on the rise with 5 – 10 years to mainstream adoption.

There is certainly no shortage of debate on the definition, scope and relative viability of social CRM (SCRM). Check out Social CRM: Strategy, Technology or Passing Fad? by Bob Thompson, for a recent opinion and some cross references to others’ thoughts. It’s clear that interest and momentum is high but plenty of room remains for clarification. I for one would like to see more in the way of reference use cases across CRM and adjacent functions to better understand processes, data usage and interdependencies. I just can’t imagine adoption hitting stride until companies can see how functional pieces and related data need fit together. All you have to do is take a look at Gartner’s rather crowded Social Software hype cycle to get a sense of potential process and data overlaps and the accompanying urge to tap the breaks a bit. Paul Greenberg, a regular contributor to ZDNet, promises more discussion on related business models and strategies..

We see that companies are beginning to get a sense of the social conversations that are taking place about their products and services. A subset of those companies is having direct conversations with customers through social media channels. For example, one of my good friends does PR for a video game company and is crushed by the need to address misinformation, negative sentiment and bring some control to the conversation about his clients. We look forward to going beyond the hype – seeing more use cases of how companies are really building the processes and technologies around social CRM.

At Exalead, we’re working on Social CRM related technologies. Constellations is an Exalead Labs experiment that looks at connections between people and between web sites. It presents a graph of related web sites or people.  The experiment is built upon our web index. The approach to relating people and things is flexible and can be based upon a configurable set of factors.

At Exalead, we are now seeing uses for search-based applications (SBAs) across many different industry sectors and enterprise departments. SBAs that have been a hot bed for Exalead are customer service-oriented applications. Recent Exalead customers have implemented SBAs within Contact Centers and also for direct use by customers (customer self-service applications).

With that in mind, I recently came across a blog on the movement of customer service towards the use of social media. Linda Evans’ entry on “Customer Service in Social Media” in particular comes to mind. What really resonates with me is the importance of companies monitoring their name in the social media space in order to be fully engaged with their customer base. It seems that the underlying challenge is how to be fully tapped in. Indeed, having a customer service Twitter channel makes a lot of sense, as does a presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. But what about the next popular channel and the next … And, how in the context of customer service, does this get pulled together as a full and cohesive view of and conversation with the customer?

Well, yes, I do have an opinion on this, and now it’s even stronger.  To maintain a 360-degree view of the company as well as its customers and competitors, channel searching needs to be both adaptive and efficient. To be truly meaningful, the result of channel searching also needs to be up-to-date and presented in a unified fashion that makes sense. Search technologies are key to enabling a company’s customer service strategy and infrastructure to adaptively find, tap into and assimilate all sources of relevant information—including social media.

First of all, thanks to Bill Ives for his post about Exalead and Search-Based Applications (SBAs).

In my discussions with Bill and others, I’ve heard a consistent refrain that an essential element of SBAs is that they enable an immediate action as opposed to providing more content for research. As Bill points out in his post, there is a compelling business case for making decisions with speedy access to as much relevant data as possible. This is exactly what SBAs allow business users to do.

An illustrative example would be our partner, the vdR group, who is using Exalead CloudView OEM to create SBAs for engineering and manufacturing organizations. Their product, Partrieve, enables engineers to locate specifications and designs for re-use in new projects. Simply put, Partrieve empowers vdR’s customers to be more efficient, to lower manufacturing costs and, ultimately, to improve profitability. It’s not a big jump from this example to say that SBAs in general empower people (and, by extension, businesses) to do their work more efficiently and creatively…and isn’t this an essential cornerstone of search technology?

As with any tool, however, the trick is in making the right design decisions so that its strengths are in line with the needs it is built to address. Based on our experience with applications we’ve helped develop and deploy, we see three unique, SBA-specific categories of capability: Usability, Agility and Performance.

• Because SBAs generally serve thousands or even millions of users, they need to be immediately usable and useful, without requiring extensive training (read: without being a time suck).
• In today’s fluid, rapidly evolving world, SBAs need to be eminently adaptable to proprietary, changing business practices and to evolving information needs.
• Given the large amounts of information that are often sourced, the high activity of user communities and the need to constantly update information in real time, unwavering performance levels – at an affordable cost – is a critical must.

Though these broad requirements are consistent across businesses and industries, the specific needs of any given organization are unique and likely to change over time. This is why a “one-size-fits-all” approach to search is dangerous. In every industry, tools are the quintessential means of improving productivity, but these tools need to be specially designed and customizable to achieve tailored results and provide the desired and user-demanded differentiation. So, we think there will be a ‘long-tail’ of SBAs alongside general-purpose search tools from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft just as there are special purpose tools for producing today’s wide spectrum of products and materials.

The result is that every organization will be able to reap the decision-making benefits of an SBA that is right-sized to meet their needs.