Keeping a coherent and accurate record of crucial information and important content can be a serious struggle for businesses, especially when working in separate teams and in different locations. This can be especially difficult when you set your sights on upscaling your business, adding more staff, more clients, and potentially more locations. Enterprise search solutions can help you and your workforce access necessary information and data quickly and easily, cutting down the time taken searching multiple systems for the relevant files.
What is enterprise search?
Enterprise search platforms are internal company tools that help to streamline access to data across all of a business’ systems, programs, and file storage sites. Employees can spend almost 20% of their time searching for information or specific files. Enterprise search combs through every connected data point to find and organise information into a set of relevant results, indexing structured data stored in CRM or CMS databases and assets like infographics, PDFs, or video. This helps workforces and teams locate and use the necessary files they need to complete tasks or manage client requests faster, boosting productivity and delivering a smoother customer experience.
How could it help your business?
The key benefit of an enterprise search tool is to prevent potential data losses and provide better organisation for a business. As an SME begins to upscale, the business typically creates new working locations and begins to incorporate new talent into an already established system. Enterprise search will ease the introduction of new technology and personnel by easily adding new information storage locations to the business data network.
An enterprise search tool will learn which data and files certain employees are searching for and accessing regularly and will build profiles that index search results based on that individual’s role and previous search history. When integrating new team members, the system will facilitate employee learning and provide the opportunity to gain self-sufficiency by simplifying the search process, building a new profile that offers the exact data and content the new staff member will need or find relevant.
What to consider when incorporating an enterprise search platform?
How big is your data network? Your business likely uses various technologies, platforms, services, databases, servers, and hardware that all contains different types and versions of critical information. All these data points will need to be indexed and connected to the enterprise search tool.
Can you customise user access to certain files and data locations? Being able to restrict which employees can access sensitive information is crucial for a business to protect customers, partners, and investors. Adding your own access rules depending on seniority is vital.
Does the enterprise search tool abide by national / international data protection laws? While the system can help prevent data losses, as it will have access to all data, business, and client information, you should ensure it will not create a weak point in your cybersecurity infrastructure, in order to protect your company and customers.
