Optimizing Your Workplace Search

Learn about a new solution to connect knowledge workers to the most relevant information.

Speaker

Katie Boschele, Product Manager, Lucidworks

[Katie Boschele]

Hi, and thank you for attending Activate 2021. My name is Katie Boschele and I’m here to talk to you today about optimizing your workplace search. 

A little bit about me first. I’m currently the product manager over the Fusion and Managed Fusion applications here at Lucidworks. Over my three years with the company, I have been able to assist with some of the biggest implementations spanning the digital commerce and knowledge management spaces. Previously, I worked for a Fortune 40 home improvement company, where I led their digital transformation in the search and navigation space, implementing Fusion and Solr over multiple websites and platforms. 

Workplace search should provide knowledge at your employees fingertips. Employers need to provide easy to find knowledge and information across multiple applications to help their employees feel productive, effective, and empowered wherever they are. Their search should be a one stop shop of materials. This common information should not be hard to find. It should be easy to sort through and be valid to their role within your company. 

So what are some of the biggest complaints from employees about their workplace search? Let’s dive in and identify the problems. 

Where can I find information or documentation? Where to begin is often the number one problem. Our information is scattered over multiple applications with different logins and can often be called something completely different than what your employees are searching for. 

What is the most important information I need to know right now? Some information can be very time sensitive and we need our employees to know about it the moment they log in. 

And finally, how do I refine the information I’m looking for? Oftentimes we have so much information that we need our employees to be able to refine the information that we are returning back to them. 

Let’s start by talking about your internal documentation, a one-stop shop for all of your employee information. I like to think about building an internal information warehouse for your employees. This will help to uncover that quote unquote lost information. When an employee is looking for documentation, whether it be the latest COVID travel policies or training information that’s pertinent to their role, it should be available and easy to find. Most employees struggle just for information, just to find the information. Where it’s housed, they could be spending countless hours going through Slack or other team chats to uncover these lost messages. Building an internal warehouse for all of your information is the foundation for an effective employee. 

Let’s look at how Lucidworks can curate the data for your workplace search. Internal documentation can come from anywhere and there’s always new information surfacing at any given time. Employers need to show the most relevant information to their employees, no matter what solution or data sources that it lives in. You could be indexing site information, pulling pertinent conversations from Slack, or even storing presentations in G Drive. 

An employee doesn’t care where the information is, they just know that they need to find it. No matter where that data lives or what the data is, we can provide your employees with a gateway to being the most infective employee they can be by making all assets available at their fingertips. 

Moving on. Let’s talk about highlighting valid content by making sure your employees know what is important right now. Different employees across your organization are gonna have different needs. 

For example, human resources employees are going to be experts in people relations and training. Engineering employees are gonna be experts in code, tech and solutions. Professional services employees are experts in customers, sales and needs from the field. They all have different needs, different information, different responsibilities within your company, but they are all looking for that work-related information. 

Looking at how Lucidworks can highlight your valid content, we will use this example of referencing your experts. You can build a page that highlights your engineering experts across different searches. The example I have shown you here is for a search for Fusion. When the search is returned, we are firing a highlighted content area where you can use people data to return the experts in that field. 

Another example that I love to talk about is for human resources employees, their biggest campaign of the year is always benefits enrollment. It would be great employee experience, if during this time you could fire a highlighted content area for all employees to see all the information they need to get enrolled, it would be front and center and available for everyone to find. 

Finally, let’s move on to talking about refining the results by using the ability to narrow your search content. So much information, such little time. 

So now that we’re returning all the assets that are available to your employees, how can we help them find exactly what they’re looking for? You can amplify the queries for your employees by adding facets to the search result pages. Faceted search is a way of classifying your records and allowing users to narrow down those results. Facets correspond to the available data that you have provided, which lets users refine them by multiple dimensions at a time. This is a more granular way to find assets and results in a specific targeted way. Facets can be changed based on the search results given for a query by your employees. 

Looking at how Lucidworks can help you narrow your content focus in the search results. Now that we have returned all the information available to your employees, it can be very overwhelming for them. You can offer them the ability to refine and filter the results by using authors or categories or any other facet. And that helps them narrow down what they’re looking for. Faceting is a quick and easy way to provide value to your employees, with what they’re going to next, when searching for something specific. 

Providing world-class search experiences are not only for your digital commerce customers, but also for workplace search users. Employees will be more productive and efficient in their roles if they are able to access and find all the information in one place. Giving them the tools they need to succeed are available to you within your Lucidworks search solutions. Employers can optimize their workplace search and make their day-to-day efforts seamless. Ultimately you’re making them more efficient and confident in their ability to add value to the role and to the company. 

As we wrap up about how you can optimize your workplace search experience, we talked about providing an information warehouse where you can build your employees a one-stop shop for all of their information available to them throughout the company that is up to date and valid for their role. 

Next, we talked about highlighting valid content where you can call out important information at any given time and put it in spotlighted zones on your search pages. 

And last we talked about faceting those results where you can allow your employees to narrow the massive amounts of information returned to them with data-driven value points. 

Thank you so much for attending my session on optimizing your search workplace. Please join me after the session for a few minutes of Q and A. Thank you again.