In recent years, the amount of data generated by organisations has increased exponentially. This has created new opportunities but also new challenges. Intelligent search solutions can make a big impact to alleviate the challenges.
The sheer volume of information can make it extremely difficult to find specific data when it’s required. In addition, data may be created and stored among a range of different processes and applications. This creates information silos — collections of data within systems that are unable to communicate with other systems.
Intelligent Search cuts through these problems by providing a unified search platform. It’s similar to the internet search engines we’re all familiar with, such as Google. Using powerful machine learning technologies, intelligent search allows organisations to interpret data effectively and break down information silos.
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Intelligent Search and AI
Intelligent search for enterprises isn’t new. In fact, it pre-dates the internet that we know today. What has changed is the amount of data and the importance of search technologies that can help to utilise that data effectively. While a Google search is unlikely to tell you why an important order hasn’t arrived or what factors might be influencing the price of materials, intelligent search technology can provide these answers for you.
The latest generation of intelligent search platforms is powered by artificial intelligence. They need to be able to interpret documents across a range of different data sources, from invoices and orders to email conversations. They must also be able to classify content and place it in its correct category, recognising information such as catalogue numbers, personal names and the names of organisations. Artificial intelligence also allows for sophisticated filtering of results, ensuring that users can find the specific information that they need.
By leveraging machine learning, intelligent search engines can further refine their results. Through machines learning and deep learning, intelligent search engines can offer accurate query suggestions and improve the results they return. The more that the search tool is used, the more responsive and accurate it becomes as it learns from previous searches. Through this process, it becomes better able to predict which information will be most useful to the user.
How Intelligent Search Helps Your Business
Intelligent search tools are invaluable for many reasons. Firstly, they can index and analyse data, creating a unified search index that lets you search across many data sources. Intelligent search permits a unified and homogenous approach to searching, indexing and returning results according to their relevance rather than their source. Through sophisticated analysis, intelligent search tools are able to recognise document content, classify that content and generate correlations between content from disparate sources.
Another important function of intelligent search is to connect data sources. Information silos are a real and growing problem for many organisations, impairing information access and decreasing productivity. If a member of staff needs to scour through multiple applications and sources to find the data that they need, this obviously hampers their progress. Intelligent search allows you to connect multiple different sources via a single platform. For example, you can use a single tool to search through online drives, email inboxes, and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms. This greatly streamlines search and retrieval of data.
Intelligent search helps users and organisations by ranking passages that it retrieves according to their relevance. This allows them to return accurate and relevant snippets and passages for any given query.
Intelligent Search Benefits
One of the key benefits of intelligent search is its ability to discover meaningful insights that can drive decision-making. As well as obvious sources such as sales data, intelligent search can mine social media and other sources of feedback to discover what customers are saying about a particular product or service. They can look at everything from maintenance reports and customer records to provide valuable insights in a fast and very precise manner.
Intelligent search gives your employees access to the information they need whenever they need it. It’s important that staff can always obtain necessary data promptly. Because intelligent search allows for a unified user experience, training can be conducted rapidly.
Intelligent search can also improve customer service. No customer likes to be given vague or inaccurate information, and the days when customers were satisfied with a static FAQ page are long gone. With intelligent enterprise search tools, your customer service teams will be able to respond more effectively to queries. Automated customer service is also facilitated, as intelligent search can be used to power your virtual agents and enhance customer-facing search features on your websites and mobile apps.
Choosing an Intelligent Search Solution
To be effective, an intelligent enterprise search solution needs to feature powerful natural language processing and sophisticated predictive AI. Because data security is so important, your chosen solution must have top-of-the-line privacy features to protect enterprise and customer data. It’s also important to choose your connectors with care — if you’re planning to stop using a particular source soon, for example, you need to be able to exclude it from your search results.
Intelligent enterprise search tools are vital to modern organisations. They save time, save money, cut down workloads and drive up revenue. Instead of trawling through masses of unstructured data, your business can become more efficient and data-driven through the power of intelligent search.
