Departments
Next
A Powerful Combination
Enterprise search and BI tools are complementary elements of a successful data-retrieval and analysis strategy.
by Lisa Campbell
Few would argue the importance of hydrogen and oxygen as individual building blocks of the natural world. And when combined as H2O, the duo’s significance can hardly be diminished.
In the business world, enterprise search and business intelligence (BI) tools are invaluable elements of corporate data retrieval in their own ways, but when combined they offer new opportunities to quench organizations’ thirst for knowledge.
A company’s information could vary from e-mail messages to marketing collateral on hundreds of campaigns to demographic and purchasing-behavior data on millions of customers and prospects. Add customer-interaction records, sales-transaction reports, inventory lists and customer feedback reports, and it’s clear that a way to wade through all of this data is needed.
The overwhelming amount of information scattered throughout most companies makes enterprise search and BI tools invaluable for organizations looking to get ahead. These tools can help companies simply and more efficiently find and combine data so it becomes mission-critical.
Compare and contrast
Enterprise search is the organized retrieval of data that spans multiple content types and localities. Employees, clients and business partners use customized search engines and content management systems to perform these searches. When properly implemented, enterprise search tools create an easily navigated interface for entering, categorizing and retrieving data, in compliance with security and data-retention regulations.
These tools help organizations index and filter data from databases, recorded voice messages and the Internet through a single interface. This allows companies to gain insight from unstructured data sources such as text documents, blogs and messaging systems. Enterprise search is becoming a critical element of the information management strategy within many companies.
A media company, for instance, might use enterprise search to find and index information about customers—via e-mail messages, chat rooms or call center notes.
In contrast, BI tools are a type of application software designed to report, analyze and present mainly structured data. These tools generally read data that has been stored in a data warehouse or data mart. Their specific purpose is to help users who are looking for an answer to a specific question or want to get a view of a specific data set.
BI tools can improve a company’s customer service operation by supplying an analytic view across disparate call center systems, for example.
Gaining this knowledge can help a company target problem areas, better manage agents, scheduling and skills allocation, and identify and share best practices across regions.
Better together
When effectively used together, these increasingly complementary tools can provide a broad and insightful discovery system.
When combined with BI tools, enterprise search morphs from being designed solely for finding and indexing information into a solution capable of helping analyze topics of interest, measure sentiment and track trends. BI tools have been doing this successfully with the data they have available, but adding more juicy morsels of information obtained through enterprise search can result in opportunities otherwise not realized.
These combined tools offer companies in many industries opportunities for deeper insight into their data:
- A marketing team at a consumer packaged goods company needs to find out what industry blogs, newsfeeds and customers are saying about its 100 top-selling products. An analysis will correlate the results gleaned from the company’s sales data, news content and call center records.
- An insurance provider needs to know why one of its regions is at 25% of its quota for the quarter, far behind the other regions, to determine how to fix the problem. The usual reports from its customer relationship management (CRM) system provide information that sales were down for one product line more than the rest. A combined enterprise search/BI solution allows the company to monitor e-mail transactions among the sales teams and find conversations about the sales support staff members’ interactions with customers. Employing an internal sales system, the company can then tie this information to its quality of output and general time management reports. It can use this to look for correlations and find solutions for improving the staff’s performance.
- A large nationwide consumer electronics retailer wants to increase sales and its average order value by bundling popular products and services into a single sale. It’s looking for any positive and negative news reports and consumer comments to get insight into what products should be bundled. An enterprise search/BI combination would allow the company to connect its internal CRM system, product catalog, images, e-mails, text documents, videos and other information sources to relevant news feeds, blogs and news releases. The combined tool can then alert the company when a product is being discussed online and detect the source and number of mentions about the item. This information can be used to determine, among other things, whether a new TV accessory announcement affected TV sales. With this information in hand, a company can make decisions about how to advertise its products, whether to bundle items and how to make future inventory decisions.
A dynamic duo
Enterprise search and BI tools are a powerful combination for an organization looking to tap all possible sources of insight into its business. Such an information discovery system can make it possible for search results to capture data that includes sales figures as well as information from e-mails and the Internet.
The duo gives companies a strategic, competitive edge when dealing with the sea of data found in the modern business world.
Lisa Campbell is a freelance marketing and technology writer in New York.
Photography by Veer