Hunting for a document might seem like just a momentary inconvenience. But it could indicate a larger problem that’s having a negative impact on employee productivity.
The ability to find and reuse relevant content is critical for professional services firms. Having a system that supports findability could mean the difference between spending hours or days on a process.
Proposal management presents unique findability challenges for professional services. An employee can’t just press a button and generate a quote for a product. They’d typically have to gather information from a variety of sources and tailor each proposal (or at least make it appear to be customized). When it’s a struggle to track that information down, it makes a huge difference in employee productivity — and your firm’s ability to attract new business. This goes beyond proposals production to include your firm’s overall ability to be responsive to client requests. The answer to any given inquiry may reside in the employee’s head — but more often than not, it will require tracking down the answer.
Here are a few indications that you need to address findability for your business information:
- A drop in customer satisfaction: When a client calls with a question, your firm’s responsiveness to the client depends on how long it takes for your team to find the right information and answer the question. If that information is buried in a colleague’s hard drive, and therefore inaccessible, it’s going to affect the level of service your firm offers.If you see a drop in customer satisfaction or an increase in complaints, it could indicate that your staff can’t find the right information or the right person fast enough to meet client expectations.
- Frustrated employees: Many studies have looked at the amount of time people waste hunting for documents. Workers spend an average of two hours per day looking for documents and other information they need to do their jobs. That’s a lot of lost productivity, and it tends to result in frustrated employees who never seem to have enough time.
- Constant informational requests via email: Sending emails back and forth to get information is a huge drain on productivity. Every time you send one of these requests, you’ve just created two tasks: One for you and one for the recipient. Your employees should be able to self-serve when finding information they need to do their jobs. If every information need triggers an email, there’s something wrong.
To improve findability, robust enterprise search capability is paramount. If you think about how you search for information on the internet, you usually don’t know where to look for it. You type a few words into Google and it directs you. Most internal search capabilities don’t come close to that intuitive experience, but a robust enterprise search allows you to type in natural language and have results presented to you. The ability to search across all business content is especially important for large organizations that generate a lot of documents over time.
Taxonomy design and automated metadata go hand-in-hand with making search more robust, attaching identifying information to each document. With a proposal, for example, you might use metadata to indicate the content type, the client name, topic and other key data.
When these processes are well automated, your documents accumulate more of this metadata over time, making them easier to find in the future. This way, enterprise search is able to analyze the text of a document as well as the key terms that are attached to it, producing better search results.
Microsoft is also preparing to roll out a new capability in Office 365 that’s likely to improve findability. Delve expands on the enterprise search concept by looking beyond the document itself to analyze the people involved with that document and the interactions between people within the Office 365 platform
It essentially uses machine learning to constantly search for documents that are relevant to each person and present it in a tile-based interface that makes search even faster and more intuitive. As Delve learns more about what you do, who you interact with and the content you need, it’s reducing the time you spend searching by trying to present exactly what you need.
Using these technologies to improve findability has a variety of benefits for professional services. You get increased productivity, but also improve the work quality. By saving time on tracking down information, you leave more time for reviewing deliverables to make sure they’re what the customer needs. That also facilitates creativity and innovation, giving you time to develop new ideas instead of pushing out boilerplate.
In addition to speeding up the time to generate a formal proposal response, better findability affects responsiveness throughout the sales cycle. If your business development team has access to content they need, they’re able to quickly answer questions from prospects instead of having to wait for someone else to find it or create it. That responsiveness in the sales cycle is a huge benefit. It sets the customer’s expectation for how your firm works, helping to differentiate you from the very first interaction.
Learn more about helping your organization leverage today’s enterprise search capabilities by contacting Portal Solutions.
