How Enterprise Search Helps Spread Holiday Cheer

It's hard to believe, but the holiday shopping season is winding down. While previously this may have meant braving the crowds and lines at the mall starting on Black Friday, more consumers are embracing the comfort and ease of online shopping. During the 2013 holiday shopping season (November and December), U.S. e-commerce sales reached $46.55 billion, accounting for 23.5 percent of total sales. This year figures to be no different. Consumers are increasingly shopping online for sales instead of rushing out to stores. In fact, online prices were forecast to hit rock bottom on Thanksgiving Day, with an average discount of 24 percent. Cyber Monday is expected to rake in $1,735 million, with the average shopper spending $124.82.

While these numbers may seem daunting to retailers, there's an unexpected way online holiday shopping traffic can be managed and optimized to help boost customer satisfaction — enterprise search.

Why Search Must Keep Up With the Increase in Shoppers
The search bar is commonly overlooked by website designers, retailers and marketers. This is troubling considering that it's often the first thing that visitors go to, especially if they have a specific item in mind. Therefore, it's extremely important that your search function makes a good first impression.

To achieve this, make sure your search box is easy to find and functions properly to avoid a high bounce rate from visitors not being able to find what they're looking for. To that end, use the search bar to suggest products to shoppers — especially ones that are related to the product they initially searched for. Employing an advanced search function is also good for this, as it will introduce additional options.

Lastly, make sure that your search box can handle the influx of traffic during the peak holiday shopping season. The last thing you want is for shoppers to walk away empty-handed because of search results coming up too slowly or, worse, not at all. Just like on any website, end-user function must be top of mind. A good user experience will translate into more customers won.

Tips for Optimizing Search
Consumers are now empowered to engage with retailers when and how they choose, across an ever-evolving array of channels — social media, email, mobile apps, etc. Creating a personalized customer experience online requires a real-time analysis of all the customer's interactions with the company to date, across all channels. This is the great roadblock to personalization.

A website's search function — oftentimes the first point of interaction for a visitor — is no exception to this rule. In order to personalize search results, companies must be able to analyze a visitor's customer engagement channels and enterprise knowledge streams in real time, and from this analysis gain a real-time "customer profile" for that visitor at that precise moment.

Enterprise search solutions are uniquely suited to this task, enabling for the indexing and normalization across channels. When certain content proves high impact for a visitor, research shows it can increase a site's number of repeat visitors by 60 percent, lift page views per visitor by 33 percent and, most importantly, increase conversions by over 30 percent.

When done correctly, site search has the ability to boost and maintain customer loyalty. There are many tools available to help build optimal search engines, but they all rely on one key aspect: an easy-to-use, comprehensive search interface.

Diane Berry is the chief knowledge officer and senior vice president, market strategy, for Coveo, a provider of enterprise search and website search technologies.