Harnessing Insights Through Search

Search is hard. It’s hard to manage, it’s hard to scale, and it’s hard to get right. Go beyond connecting people to their data — it’s time to truly connect you to your customers and employees, so they experience delightful interactions with your brand.

In year’s past, we’ve shared how you can understand people’s needs, preferences, and expectations across channels, and personalize every digital moment for your customers or employees through these connected experiences. Now, learn how to simplify search to make these moments matter — the connections between people, the signals that we generate that show our preference and intent, and how the insights from those signals can be harnessed to connect people to the right information at the precise right moment.

Intended Audience

Technology and business leaders interested in improving customer and employee experiences through search, AI and personalization.

Attendee Takeaway

Finding what’s needed at the moment shouldn’t be hard for your customers and employees. And powering search, browse, and discovery experiences shouldn’t be hard for your team.

Speaker

Will Hayes, CEO, Lucidworks

[Will Hayes]

Well, let’s give it up for DJ D-Sharp from the Golden State Warriors. Thank you so much. That was a great way to get us kicked off this morning and get us in the right energy. 

Welcome everybody, we are so excited to have you. I am Will Hayes, the CEO of Lucidworks and it is my privilege to be your host today for Activate 2021. 

We’ve got a fantastic lineup of speakers today, we are so excited to have you here today. We cannot wait to have this event back in person, and we are committed to doing that as soon as possible, as soon as we can safely bring everyone back together because we know how much we miss being with this community. We miss seeing everybody, we miss the innovation and the conversation, and we just can’t wait to host you again. 

You know I thought before we kicked off this morning, we would take some time to talk about some of the themes that we talked about last year. Some of the topics that were top of mind for our users, top of mind in discussions and in presentations and where we’ve come in the last year in addressing a lot of those issues and a lot of those opportunities. 

There’s no question today that we have a massive opportunity, that technology has evolved in a way that has made so many more capabilities attainable, cloud services becoming more pervasive, the adoptability, the time to value increasing, that this is the time for us to capitalize on this moment to deliver capabilities and delight back into our users in the moments that they show up. Moving from just purely operationalizing search and AI at scale, to starting to really harness those insights. 

And in our conversations with you over the last year, we heard constantly how big of an opportunity everybody felt this was. The stakes could never be higher today. We want to be able to retain talent wherever they might be, provide them tools and productivity that help them do their jobs. We want to engage our users, create experiences that build loyalty, differentiate ourselves through brand. 

And in order to do this, we have to harness the power of the insights that we capture from our users, in the moment, and try to really understand how do we meet their needs, because if you can interpret those needs, there’s endless possibility of what you can deliver. 

Now last year we heard from various presenters about how they were harnessing insights and what they were able to do with that and the outcomes that they were able to drive. We heard about Morgan Stanley taking a single knowledge base to service 3 million clients, making 15,000 financial advisors superstars with the effectiveness that they get from shared insights, from compounding the value of those through various channels, so they can provide the best service possible back into those clients. 

We saw outcomes at Lenovo from harnessing the power of insights, connecting those experiences through channels, understanding those users‘ needs in the moment and the returns and the impact that that had to the top line. So there’s no question that now is the time for us to capitalize on these opportunities and there’s no question that it starts with understanding users. 

And at Lucidworks we have over a decade of experience working across a diverse set of industries, state and local governments, Telco, Financial Services, online services that were born in this digital era. And we start to collect themes and we start to understand where are the biggest challenges and the biggest rocks that folks would like to move, and what is possible when we succeed in doing that? 

The impact is obvious and the starting points are quite obvious. We start with this person in the center of all the things that we do, our users, and we understand that our users are showing up in a different context with different needs and different demands and so understanding their signals, collecting those signals, compounding those signals is a tremendous opportunity and search provides a foundation to do this effectively. 

So then what’s holding us back, what is the hesitation when we know that there’s so much potential? Well, it’s quite simple. When we take a look at what is the perceived lift to make these things happen, we start to get wary and we start to understand that the impact does not always match the amount of investment that we’re making. And there’s a hesitation to perpetuate that when we don’t fully understand where we might go, when there’s not enough predictability. What the market and what you’ve been telling us for a very long time is we’ve got to find ways to increase the impact with lighter lift. 

We are agile organizations. We want to be able to iterate, and we want to see the value of those iterations. And in these conversations we understood that there were three key components to making these things a reality. And that we saw an opportunity in working with our customers to deliver capabilities that could help deliver on that reality. 

Starting with rapid intelligence, getting things to be smart much quicker, so we can see the impact. Not going down these long tail side experiments, not waiting a year for the machine learning models to turn on, but focusing on cold start, focusing on things like vector technology where we can start to compound the value of signal data captured from your users, along with content and find relevancy in a way that was never before possible. Making sure that we can deploy things quickly, finding adjacent use cases. 

Once we’re collecting all this rich user data from a single channel, we want to apply it to the next channel. We need to be able to integrate those data sources quickly. We need to be able to understand workflows that we can put in front of our users, put in front of our business users in particular, who can start to guide that final mile of experience with the insights that they’re delivered back from the system. And we need to have that visibility so we can start to predict what those impacts might be. So we can start to put priority behind those various investments and various initiatives. 

So we’re very excited at Lucidworks today to announce after 18 months of development, that we are working on the next generation of insight-driven search. And we’re delivering this in a SaaS platform that is easy to use, quick to deploy, and always on. Meaning the insights that we’re capturing, the data points that we’re capturing are constantly being processed to deliver new perspectives on value, to surface new opportunities for your organization, for your enterprise, in terms of how you can better deliver on those user expectations. 

Making sure that we can bring things in quickly and contextually so we can get to those data sources that are critical to our workflows, so we can understand user intent as it’s coming back from this signal data, put those insights back in front of our professionals, those human beings who understand the intent a way a machine never could and giving them interfaces so they can drive those experiences home, both on the consumer side, merchandising products and services, but also internally within our enterprise applications, optimizing those experiences. 

And finally insights, insights, insights. We want to understand every data, every data point, every metric, every single time we are impacting a user’s experience for the better we want to capture that, we want to persist that, and we want to have visibility into that so we can have predictability. And this is the foundation of our new platform and our goal was to meet those needs and meet those opportunities that you’ve been telling us over the years and to ensure that the impact that you get from those investments can be carried forward, that they don’t live in isolation, that we’re not putting insights into silos that don’t become available, but we’re freeing them to be available across every channel. 

So you’re gonna hear a lot more today from our product leaders, you’ll get to see some demonstrations, but we invite you to come have a conversation with us about what this next generation of search can look like for you and where we can use these capabilities to help you go and achieve your goals. 

So I want to thank you all again for joining us today. We are very excited to have you, we are very excited to see you if it’s even virtually, and we cannot wait to host you again in person very soon, but let’s have a wonderful day. Thank you very much, everybody.