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Nowadays, merciless competition, pressure on profit margins, the cost of creating and launching new projects, few demands, new markets, and in many cases over costs in production, entail companies to focus all their efforts on promoting innovation, achieving new cost reduction strategies and having a product on the market as quickly as possible. It is when the term R+D is playing a crucial role.

On the other hand, consumers want and expect quality standards, competition, demand, and technical and legal requirements to change rapidly. Companies having all these variables must keep a large number of criteria updated and are wondered, to whom does this responsibility belong? For a few years now, all these variables and all these changes have been brought together in the area of ​​research and development (R+D).

What is R+D? The main function of this department is the search and analysis of different services, products, methodologies, and activities that can improve the current and future life of the organization. Research and development are two of the most relevant and essential aspects of the growth and sustainability of a company. Organizations bet on knowledge management to increase profits, bearing in mind that since 2017 companies do not classify it as an expense, nor as a production cost, but as a valuable investment for the maintenance of the present and the future of the company.

The R+D team is indispensable within the organization and their contribution is invaluable. They are in charge of giving a stable vision towards the future within the companies, either by developing new ways of doing processes or technologies, or different variables around the product for the competition, the market, or the consumer. This is in order to reinvent organizations, obtain greater transversal benefits for the company, and directly impact the user.

One of the pillars so that the R+D departments can carry out a good job in favor of the company’s interests; is giving them the possibility of nourishing themselves with the information, not from a piece or a segment, but from all the information. It means, data from customers, the competition, the scientific environment, the market, or experts. On many occasions, organizations already possess this information, from years of experience or from seeing the market. However, this is not so simple, because, in the huge sea of ​​data, this amount of information can leave areas completely overwhelmed. By having the information, there are more challenges in its management, organization, finding, and accessing. Responding to this need to access information and find it in a timely manner, organizations opted for search and knowledge management solutions based on Artificial Intelligence (hereinafter AI).

Incorporating AI into knowledge management or enterprise search solutions can help the R+D team to find and use the information the company already has in an agile and assertive manner. Not only by word search, but by using relevance, getting faster answers to any question, and optimizing decision making. All this with complete data and in real-time.

Enterprise search tools are capable of adapting machine learning, helping businesses in their ability to track processes, files, documents, images, workflows, and any monitored data. This improves how content is used within the enterprise. Companies constantly generate insights, data, and information from a variety of sources across the enterprise. For example, the production area creates daily content from supplies, labor, raw material transformation, finance of accounting information, bank movements, entries, and exits. The marketing department is constantly creating product content, competition, customers, brand, and suppliers. All this information, which the company constantly creates, is valuable and useful, however, its validity and relevance also change rapidly and its value is devalued for the company’s interests.

Tools like IFINDIT creates a satisfying information search experience for the user, connecting the data they need and presenting the most relevant information first. Using artificial intelligence techniques that make search engines intelligent tools that anticipate needs and reduce search time, broadening the experience and revealing information from the entire company without depending on the format, source, or origin, and accessing from a secure point and with the access permissions to the information delivered by the company. The R+D team has global access to information to optimize and manage available resources, accelerate product delivery, reduce costs, leverage intellectual property, understand the market and consumers, improve impact opportunities, minimize the loss of labor or downtime of workers, improve the quality of products and their safety, but above all making the processes more profitable. Additional IFINDIT gives you a way to efficiently manage information. Through dashboards, information can be integrated into a single system, and get answers to key questions in real time. IFINDIT integrates to any database, system, or repository, connecting data in a more agile way, in addition, to generating the user’s own visibility in pre-established boards and building those that best fit the need for R+D.

In conclusion, the IFINDIT tool is able to use and take advantage of each of the data and information of the entire organization, either as a query or as a library, reacting and learning quickly from the needs around the objectives and goals of the R+D team and the demands of the environment. IFINDIT efficiently teaches transversal teams to use and work around the collaboration of obtaining information and sharing their work, in such a way that companies can make better decisions, reduce risks, and stimulate and promote innovation.

Let’s think as a consumer, behind any virtual or face-to-face channel, what we are looking for is a fast, efficient and consistent solution to our requests. As a consumer, we feel identified with the situation, as we all have carried out PQRS on a product and we have been part of a customer service management process.

And if we don’t think as consumers, but rather we think about the experience that the consumer or user is having on a daily basis, we will realize that it is an issue that stems from frustration and the expectation of experience.

Customers choose mainly assisted options and automatic channels, which they constantly search in various internal and external databases, or information sources and systems, plus its support tools, however, this information is not always available. Contacts with chatbots become more common, which speeds up the waiting time a bit, but the answers are mostly limited and we will end up connecting the user, already more frustrated, with service agents, who will again have to consult the information in different sources to solve the requirement. In addition to this personalized service, it is normal that searching for information, analyzing, and, going through multiple sources of information is a time lost, before being close to giving the user a solution. This is also where our service agents can lose their bearings and make mistakes that lead us to lower our ratings and service perceptions or worse, lose our users.

That initial contact with the automation or our specialized service agents is a daily test that companies have. With a bad experience, there is a great possibility that the consumer will lose interest, if the requirement is attended to inefficiently or if the request is not resolved in the first instance.

Being able to have a view of all information, from all sources, and in all formats is a doable illusion with enterprise search.

The customer service force could use enterprise search like using the internet search engine, it’s that easy and fast. And it would not enter to authenticate or search tool by tool or portal by  portal, but rather, it could condense all the information in a simple search and, without exposing the quality of the information, regardless of the source or if the data is structured and unstructured or its format. All these, will help to meet the service expectations of our users and the promise delivered by the brand.

Business search not only searches, but also finds, extracts, filters, and, categorizes all the data that may rest in any information system, in addition to generating a single view. The AI ​​can show the relevant results depending on the query to be even more assertive and this is specifically where we refer to the concept of 360 ​​views of our clients.

The 360 ​​view is a detailed view of the users that brings information from channels and, information systems, not only current but also collects the historical traceability of behavioral information, thus achieving a much more accurate understanding of each of the users, enhancing the experience with consistent data. The 360 ​​view is more than just a way to see information clearly and readily available in a single view of customers. It is a strategy that goes to the veins of the organization, where actions and decisions are made based on real, consistent and concrete data, where not only customers enter, but also prospects, suppliers and, collaborators.

One of the deepest and most exposed areas of the organization is the customer service force and possibly one of the most structured in terms of measurement, qualification, and analysis. It is not random that the most advanced indicators are linked to the customer service force and it is also not random that it is one of the areas with the highest compliance visibility within the organization.

The customer service force has indicators such as FRT customer waiting time for the first service, AHT average time of interaction with the user, and AR service abandonment rate. And not only operational, we have the CSAT that measures customer satisfaction, CRR that provides us with retention information, and NPS service rating. The 360 ​​views of the consumers, can impact all these indicators based 100% on the information that we can find in the user, the analysis, and the action, giving the customer service force a condensed view in real time that will help meet user expectations, positively increase management indicators and reduce work team frustration.

With this tool capable of also increasing the emotional salary, the customer service forces do a better job, improve the service attitude and face fewer annoying and unwieldy consumers. Moreover, lowering the rate of desertion and rotation, which is a KPI that directly affects the objectives of the organization due to the investment in recruitment and training.

In conclusion, if at this time the ratings given by users regarding your user service are not expected, the delay in responding to prospects from your digital sales department is causing to lose customers, or operational errors are costing not only the loss of prospects but also penalties and fines, it is time to hand over weapons to the customer service force to carry out work flawlessly and giving users the experience they had always expected with IFINDIT.

The most heard question in the corridors of companies is: How do consumers behave? In the marketing, sales, and management departments, with team leaders and all areas where our core business goes to a final consumer.

Inside the heads of market analysts, we thought that we could encapsulate our audience in specific segments and niches, but as time goes by and more and more technologies are developed, companies realize that the process of listening to our clients, covers multiple disciplines and many sources of information, and most importantly, our consumers are unique and unrepeatable.

In the race against the time that companies and organizations live daily, not only as companies that provide a service but also as consumers, living an experience that is much more adapted to a true essence, to a real need and the expected expectation as a buyer, is it becomes the only real and indisputable objective to reach the goal.

Consumer behavior is based on multiple different factors that intervene in making decisions to acquire a particular service or product. Its analysis provides feasible purchase prediction tools, however, from the psychology and sociology of the consumer, the tacit contact with the purchaser occurs through subtle digital actions, possibly a little more understandable for Mathematics and statistics and, in the context of analysis and prediction, is where data mining and BigData play a fundamental role for said analysis.

Data mining has the ability to analyze huge amounts of information, which includes a set of techniques and technological tools capable of making the sea of ​​data useful. Through data mining data is analyzed and transformed into decisive conclusions for decision-making about consumer behavior, predicting the consumption behavior of those who buy, the use they give it, and also the reason for the choice. Before, companies concentrated their efforts on mass dissemination in an attempt to target consumers for their ability to stand out. Nowadays, and with a permanent Internet connection, consumers are looking for a valuable message with particular relevance, in other words, personalized content and products that are explicitly designed directly for the person who receives them.

In addition to this new amount of data managed by the marketing areas and their users, the new expectation around the experience and the anticipation of converting the real wishes of buyers, strategy developers find themselves at a crossroads, as these data are infinite volumes, not just static volumes, and that they grow by a thousandth of a second, and are stored in many information systems and multiple formats. Consumer information is difficult to access, find, and analyze, and it is where having a tool capable of not only searching but also finding information, is essential to achieve management objectives.

Enterprise search is the technology that offers us an experience similar to internet search engines that helps us search and locate exact consumer data, in any format or location. With business search, data from information sources such as email, digital files, information systems (ERP, CRM, HCM), websites, intranet, and file management systems (document managers), come to life, giving analysis tools the real information to find the behavioral responses of customers, the audience or buyers.

Between the business search and the data analysis of the mining and Big Data, in order to know the consumer, it will not only be a task that is carried out subjectively but also transcends being able to deliver a product according to the need that has each of the consumers, a striking message and providing an experience that meets their expectations.

In conclusion, when we talk about delivering a precise product to consumers and customers and delivering a powerful message to the audience, the nature of the company or the product does not matter, what really matters is understanding who that audience is in order to define the particular strategies for each of them—knowing whom to talk to, and what type of consumer or client, is a challenge that companies must face in business search and analytics. The real difference and leadership within the categories are achieved by giving the true relevance to the data, which is where the real answers are.

Author: Creangel