How To Transform Your Digital Support Center Into A Customer Intelligence Hub

**With a meager 6 to 16% response rate on average, businesses are realizing that surveys don't always give strong visibility into customers' support experiences at scale. The good news? Gone are the days when customer surveys were the only way to gather feedback on your digital customer experience: instead, modern, AI-powered search experiences combined with strong analytics can yield a comprehensive view of what your online customers are looking for — and whether they're currently able to find it on your help site. In other words, when you can see and evaluate what your customers are searching for on your site, you don't have to beg for feedback: you'll know. This complete customer feedback loop lets your brand tailor its digital help content to what your customers are actually interested in. An added bonus? As a result of this targeted, personalized experience, you can expect better CX metrics with fewer outreaches to your support team. It also gives your customers the self-service option they desire: studies suggest that over 80 percent of consumersattempt to solve issues independently before reaching out for live customer support. Finally, increasingly stringent data privacy regulations mean that standard ways of learning about customer preferences — like cookies — are on their way out. Even Google is moving away from traditional cookies and is expected to phase cookies out of its Chrome product entirely by 2024. This means that your support organization will need to rely on other, fully anonymized means of learning about relevant customer interests. Seeing customer search insights at scale is a fantastic way to do just that. Here are 5 things you should look for in your support search provider to get the best insights possible — helping you turn your support center into an intelligence hub:

1. Search analytics. At its most basic, your provider should let you see what pages and search terms are surfacing in customer searches. However, if your provider's underlying search technology is subpar, the value is limited.
2. Searches with no results. To inform your support center's content strategy, it's critical for you to see what searches are returning no results. That way, you can create relevant pages or investigate why appropriate existing content is not surfacing.
3. Search term clustering. This machine learning feature clusters groups of terms together so that you can understand trends in your help center's searches at scale. For example, a bank's searches for queries like "when is Bank X's Mission Hill branch open?" and "Bank X Mission Hill hours" could be overlooked individually if they surface only a few times, but when grouped it's clear that users want to know when the bank's Mission Hill branch is open. You can then ensure that the appropriate page is created.
4. Semantic understanding. Search term clustering is dependent on good underlying natural language understanding. New AI search technology - like Yext's - can understand what users are searching for, even when they don't all use the same language. Your search technology should understand that "How do I track my order?" asks the same question as "Where is my package?" even though the queries use different words. Understanding that these kinds of queries mean the same thing is critical to grouping and gathering intelligence at scale.
5. Sentiment analysis. To take semantic understanding even further and improve your insights, consider a provider whose search can understand whether your customer's search tones are positive or negative. This can help you understand how customers feel about your brand's service and products. You can read more about sentiment analysis on our website. Your digital support center does not need to be a cost center that only assists customers; it can also be a phenomenal source of customer insights. While traditional customer feedback in the form of surveys is useful, the indirect customer feedback from searches on your digital support center lets you see what your customers want, whether their queries return results, and even whether or not they are satisfied through advanced technology like sentiment analysis. What's more? With a good provider, this valuable information is available at scale with minimal effort from you. To learn more about Yext's Support solutions, click here.**