3 Reasons to Dump Your Enterprise Search Solution

Sure you’d love to walk into your office and wonder aloud, “What are the sales projections for this quarter?” A small glowing orb on our desk talks back, “Would you like revenue or profit projections? And would you like that broken down by territory?”

Chances are you’re nowhere near that. At all.

Surveying the industry landscape and hearing first-hand from our customers – here’s the three main reasons it’s time to think about deploying an enterprise search application (or divorcing your old one).

No One Can Find Anything

You search for something. You get a lot of bad results.You add a few more words. It’s a little better but still kinda “off.” You scroll a few pages. Still not finding what you need. You drop into a Slack channel or email a coworker to ask, “Where’s that Word doc we talked about in that Zoom during the offsite right before the holidays?” And you wait for them to respond. Another half hour of work wasted because you can’t find anything. 

And it’s almost worse getting lots of search results that don’t answer your question – or no results at all. But, you know the information is out there. Somewhere.

As legacy search systems get longer in the tooth, the quality of their search results starts to go down. The number of documents and data sources increases and the algorithms that worked when the system was first deployed (probably before you even got to the company) don’t really work any more. The amount of time you have to spend manually fine-tuning things on the backend delivers ever-diminishing returns.

Today’s search applications rely less on long lists of manually entered and curated rules to connect users to the right documents. Now there’s more reliance on machine learning and other technologies to continuously fine-tune and adjust as more documents are indexed and more employees use the system.

Your UI Is Terrible

In addition the quality of search results, the overall user experience is also critical in making sure an enterprise search project succeeds. And not just making it look pretty – it has to not just be usable but useful. Your users have personalized customer and shopping experiences at home, and they’re starting to expect them at work. Uniquely personal experiences are now possible for enterprise applications. 

Modern enterprise search applications can use user behavior – queries, clicks, views, bookmarks –  and user profile – job role, office, region, location – and a myriad of other user information to create a truly personalized search experience for every employee. This even includes proactive recommendations that connect them to the right data – sometimes before they even search.

Silos (Still!) Shut Everyone Out

How long has everyone been talking about silos? About as long as they’ve been saying, “No really, you’ve got to think outside the box.” We know it by rote now: “The silos! You have to break down the silos? Why aren’t you breaking down the silos? Why do you love silos so much?”

And it’s still true. When everyone’s data and documents are shut off from the rest of the organization, nobody benefits. When you don’t have a search app that searches everything – a unified search experience – you’ll spend 10 minutes searching on one app and 10 more minutes over on that other one and another 10 on another.

A broken search experience means teams can’t find the data they need, or when they finally do the results are stale, incorrect. An even bigger risk is when you waste time re-collating, replicating, and duplicating work that someone else in the organization has already done. 

A better search experience gets everyone the information they need to do their jobs as soon as they need it. And with skilled knowledge workers in short supply (and expensive to keep), this is more important than ever.

Let’s Get Going

It’s time to replace hit-or-miss search with an all-in-one answer platform for data diggers, fact finders and edge seekers everywhere. More than anything, it’s time to find out what’s possible when employees have all the insights they need, whenever they need them. Contact us today or use the form below.