Search Done Right

We at Vivisimo use a CRM system from a vendor I won’t name.  For a long time, we have been crawling its contents in order to enable searching our CRM account as a tab on our own internal enterprise search; CRM search results are also returned on our default ‘All’ tab.  Clicking on a search result takes me into the native CRM system, when I can’t get what I want just from the search results page itself.  Of course, our internal search is powered by Velocity, since we eat our own dog food.

Recently I wondered what the embedded search in the CRM system looks like and was shocked to discover how bad it was: how much content it misses, and how poor the user experience is.

Why do I search our CRM?  One reason is navigation to a particular account, and the embedded CRM search is OK for that narrow purpose.  But, as a company knowledge worker, I also seek insight about broader issues:

1. Where are we working with partner A?
2. Where are we running into competitor B?
3. Which of our customers or prospects are using content repository C?
4. What interactions have we had with individual D?
5. What’s the latest goings-on with customer E?
6. What are we doing in country F?

To show the difference, I did the same query ‘docushare’ on both search engines, seeking insight into where we run into this not-commonly-used electronic content management system from Xerox. Below are two screenshots; the CRM vendor’s native embedded search, and searching our CRM account’s content with Velocity:

Quite a difference in content, usability, and insights.

Dear reader: I am curious about your own CRM system, how and why it is searched, whether the search is any good, and whether your CRM content is accessible from your enterprise search engine, if you have one.  Comments are invited.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 12th, 2008 at 4:41 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.