Navigating your way to a competitive advantage

CXO. Having some online capability is now pretty much an essential element of any European business. Have you seen an increased interest in your own products and solutions in line with this, and what do you put this down to?

LS. There has certainly been a growing interest in our products and in demand from the business world. But it has also become increasingly apparent that today we are producing and sharing more and more content online, as a result of which the content industries are flourishing. It’s also becoming increasingly apparent that the only published content that is really positive is content that is consumed. As a market segment, we are in the business of enabling the consumption of that content and the search area is a fast growing sector for this reason.

CXO. So why do we need to understand the behaviour of those visiting and searching our websites?

LS. In the past, if you were a merchant or the head of a company you would spend a lot of time talking to your customers, trying to get a better understanding of what they want and where they are heading. Today, however, the element of communication has disappeared, and many companies are now desperate for new ways to enable them to understand their customers.

In the business world today, enterprises basically offer everything they have by way of content and products on their website and customers just pick from that, a little like a big supermarket. But while in this case people are choosing only from everything shown on the site, the search tool does the job of an information booth, where the customer can request those things that can’t be seen. Basically, the search is gathering information that cannot be found from an intuitive look on the website. By interpreting the search enquiries, what users are finding or not finding, you start to understand what is it you are currently offering and which parts of the market you are not covering sufficiently.

CXO. And how can an enterprise go about getting that information and turn that into a more efficient or productive service?

LS. Firstly, you can take a look at what product or service it is people are searching for and whether they are following the path that you intended or that you want them to follow. If they are not, then different techniques can be used to tweak your navigation or search technologies to ensure visitors to your portal end up where you want them to.

The other thing you can do is to examine whether they are searching for something you are offering at a particular time. A good example of why this is important is one of our customers, a large TV station. After conducting a poll, the company realised that many people searching the website were looking for TV programmes that the TV station did not actually offer. As a result, this analysis proved to be incredibly important factor in developing the station’s new programming policies.

It is this ability of companies to use the business intelligence gained from online consumer requests to shape their business strategies that we see having a huge impact right now.

CXO. According to your website, your solutions enable enterprises to ‘perform effective online dialogue with customers’. What do you mean by ‘online dialogue’ and why is this important?

LS. By nature, the search process is a dialogue because someone poses a question and the search engine responds. Of course, an automated dialogue will generate a number of potential answers to a single question. If you look at consumers as a group, you can see how that group has asked a particular question and can then consider what your ideal response would be to that question.

For example, an American web usability expert called Jacob Nielson looked at the what people were searching for on his website and found that many searched for his name. He realised, however, that as he signed nearly every document online with his name, those searching would basically get a whole site map of the website in response, because everything bore his name. He also found from the research that the next question everyone was asking was ‘who is Jacob Neilson’. He therefore created a new page on his website so that when people searched for his name they would be taken directly to a page explaining who Jacob Neilson is.

It is only by trying to understand what is behind people’s online search behaviour that you can ensure you provide the answers that you as an organisation want to provide, and would give whether that question was asked in a meeting, over the telephone or online. It is through this that you can take a search and use it as a way to ask questions of your own organisation, questions that enable you to make strategic and tactical decisions about how you want to answer a particular question.

CXO. Are there any particular types of enterprise that are likely to benefit especially from this?

LS. It’s useful across the board, for any organisation that aims over time to optimise the information it offers to its target group over. Those likely to benefit most from our technology will be those that try to measure the results of what they do, and that includes companies offering products online. For example, the Canadian Mint, which has an information portal and a shop online, wanted to have navigation and search facilities across both. It is in situations such as this, where a shop is included amongst a large pool of information or editorial content, that companies will see the most benefit from our solutions.

CXO. So what’s next; what’s your own strategy for the future?

LS. Looking back over the last 20 years, the IT industry has been dedicated to helping organisations try to save money in various elements of their administration or business processes. Today, I see a larger move whereby companies are looking to gain a greater market share and a better position using IT. I believe the intelligent and strategic use of content technologies such as our own will play a growing role in trying to gain that competitive advantage and strongly suggest that companies take a look.

In the mid-term, our company will likely focus more on publicly available portals and websites for our customers. However, we’ve also seen a continuing growth in interest in our viewpoints within companies – in internal websites or intranets. Many companies now want to revise their internal information policies, with decisions about the distribution of information now being made through IT systems. We see the exact same mechanisms inside large corporations as we have seen on the marketplace and our company will offer our solutions for internal portals within corporations in the future as well.