FAST Customer Service Portal Solution Improves Search Capabilities and Results
Project At a Glance
RDA created a stable, strategic search platform using Microsoft FAST technology that enables a rich end user experience and provides speedy and relevant search results. The new system has increased the efficiency and accuracy of our client’s customer service team and provides self-service help desk support to customers, which has reduced the overall number of calls to customer support by almost 20 percent. The solution is able to search more data than the previous system because it indexes data from a variety of content sources. Also, search results may be accessed from multiple existing applications.
About Our Client
RDA’s client is a leading provider of software for human resources, benefits and payroll systems.
Background
Our client’s search platform is used by approximately 180 customer service reps to internally research customer issues and system problems.
The former platform did not provide the necessary value and business insight the company needed. Users often complained that they could not find the correct search result for an error code or locate the recommended fix for a problem. The former platform was also costly to maintain. Our client paid roughly $150,000 per year in maintenance fees.
Our client sought the ability to adjust the relevancy of searches to provide users with a richer and a more meaningful search experience. They were also looking to replace the existing system with a solution that would have a lower total cost of ownership and be easier to implement and maintain. The new system would also be externally accessed by their customer base as a first line of help desk resolution, which would help reduce calls to customer support.
Solution Detail
RDA helped our client create a stable, strategic search engine that enables a rich end user experience and provides speedy and relevant search results. With the installation of FAST and the use of the specific tuning procedures and processes, RDA helped this developer build a firm foundation for enterprise search beyond the existing search system’s capabilities.
The solution leverages FAST Enterprise Search Platform (ESP) version 5.3, in addition to related FAST technologies.
This project encompassed two main functional areas. The first area involved the construction of the FAST index and the second the construction of a user interface. The two portions in concert provided a complete search application that services current and potential customers as well as internal customer service professionals.
To begin the construction of the FAST environment, RDA first built the server cluster (FAST term for a multi server installation) that would index and query the existing content. RDA worked with our client to specify the server configuration that made the most sense. Once the cluster was configured, RDA developed the index profile and the data collection for each data source. As part of the index creation process, RDA implemented the FAST Security Access Module (SAM). The SAM module builds user and group information into the index to allow queries to be security trimmed based on document level permissions for employees.
The “Ask Us” interface allows an administrator to identify a series of search results that will be grouped together and displayed in a single control. This functionality is used when quarterly or yearly updates are identified to allow customers to find these items with little effort. The search interface is composed of four main pages and three independent controls that can be used on a landing page to provide added functionality. Searches are performed from either a basic or advanced query page.
Part of the system development includes a framework that allows users to save searches they perform and recall the same search again later. As part of this framework a control will be created to list recent searches and another control to list saved searches.
The search interface application is accessed from one of five main systems including the external website, a customer support site, the UltiPro portal, CSC or the internal Ask Us site. Each site accesses a different set of data and has slightly different requirements. The same search and results controls are used for each site. To configure the search properly, the controls are deployed to each site and provide css class definitions to provide a custom look and feel for each interface.
Benefits
The solution provides our client with a stable, strategic search engine that enables a rich end user experience and provides speedy and relevant search results.
In addition to internal customer service reps, the new system is externally accessed by our client’s customer base as a first line of help desk resolution. It is anticipated that the externally facing customer support system will reduce level one calls by 15-18%.
Our client is also experiencing the following benefits of the new system:
- The solution indexes data from many more source systems.
- The system seamlessly maps user accounts between systems with various authentication providers.
- Search results may be accessed from multiple existing applications.
- Results are reliable and relevance can be tuned by document or by user group.
- A single authentication account provides users with secure access to various types of content.
- Search results are permission-based: searches return only the documents to which a user has access.
- RDA custom controls provide an interface to saved, recent, and popular searches.
Technically Speaking
This application was developed as ASP.NET web pages and leveraged FAST search technology, including FAST ESP 5.3, FAST Security Access Module (SAM), FAST Lotus Notes Connector, FAST JDBC Connector, and FAST SharePoint Connector.
The project consisted of two efforts that came together to form a single flexible enterprise search interface.
The first effort involved finding, extracting and indexing data from different content sources. These sources included SharePoint collaboration sites, the company website, content from a SQL database, documents from file shares and multiple databases from Lotus Notes. RDA implemented the connectors and built custom pipelines to process the unique data from each source into a single optimized index profile.
Security was a major concern and users had multiple accounts that had to be associated so that searches returned all the documents to which a user had access. The Security Access Module was used to map a user’s logon credentials from Active Directory to authorization grants made in the Lotus Notes system.
The search index was going to be used initially by five different audiences. To provide a discrete set of available content for each role, a search profile was developed that mapped to each user. These search profiles allowed one or more of the 11 content collections to be searched as a group. The user interface developer could then determine which search profile was appropriate for their target audience.
The second effort involved constructing a flexible user interface for the search engine that could be leveraged by multiple applications with discrete styling in each. The application was modeled as a series of five user controls to handle search and results. The controls could then be placed onto any web page and common style elements could be modified via CSS to customize the appearance of the rendered display. The results interface allowed users to have a conversational experience with the results by making modifications through a series of navigators or by performing searches within the result set.
Three special controls were developed to provide an interface to saved, recent and popular searches. To enable this functionality, each search was saved and a web service was developed to aggregate the information. These controls provided a time saving feature for users that was not provided by the FAST framework and was identified as a major benefit by making the search experience more productive.
Next Steps: