Businesses increasingly want IT leaders to play a role in driving revenue and strategy, but natural concerns over infrastructure stability may get in the way.
The discussion these days around IT leadership is about how CIOs need to drive revenue to the top line. But does that grand mission get compromised by the daily concerns of managing infrastructure and operations?
That may sometimes be the case, according to intelligent search, knowledge management and analytics vendor Inquira. The company just released Version 8 of its namesake software, which takes a natural language approach to understanding users’ web site search queries.
Inquira's large customers in industries such as finance, telco, and automotive use its technology to understand the business intent of their users’ search queries and provide managed answers to those questions, in contrast to hyperlinks to other content delivered by name-brand search engines like Google and Yahoo.
Companies can add to their knowledge base of managed answers content generated through built-in automated workflows; messages can be routed to internal experts about developing new content, the results forwarded to other experts in the company for validation, and finally published for self-service use on the web site or use by call center reps. Companies can use the product’s analytic capabilities to generate data on what users are searching for, how well those requests are being matched to answers, and so on.
Here’s an example: At Toyota.com, which Inquira says just went live on its platform last week, users can type in anything from “best mileage cars” to “show me MPGs of your cars”, or any other phrase that suggests they care about auto mileage, and the site will serve up a visual chart of its vehicles arrayed according to mileage per gallon.
“It’s a way for customers to engage in conversations that can drive the site visitors to the next level of interaction and ultimately to conversion of some form — (such as) find the closest dealer to check out the car first-hand,” says Inquira marketing vice president Tim Shetler.
Going Beyond IT
Inquira, says Shetler, is selling clients around the idea that its technology can change the customer experience on the web — but it’s not making that pitch to IT leadership. It’s targeting business-unit owners in customer sales or marketing or heads of customer support groups.
Inquira contends that the business-unit owners it targets get its point that keyword response are useful only to an extent, a bigger-picture issue that most IT departments miss.
“We don’t go after IT,” he says. “If you do go after IT, their main concern is how to put something behind the search box on the web site that doesn’t require maintenance.”
An enterprise search appliance from a vendor like Google may offer a greater level of simplicity, but keyword search results don’t measurably reduce call handling time if an agent has to look through hundreds of responses to handle a request, Shetler says. Nor does it help drive people on a web site down a conversation path.
“If IT has a strong hand, we won’t be around very long,” he notes, adding that that doesn’t happen very often. IT typically gets involved about mid-way through discussions, after senior management has already bought into the project, he says.
IE 7
Firefox 2.0
