Before the COVID-19 pandemic, enterprise employees spent an average of 1.8 hours every day searching for the information and data they need to do their jobs, according to McKinsey & Co. findings. Now that they’re physically separated from teammates and collaborators, finding that information is even harder.
After all, prior to the pandemic only about 15% of U.S. employees worked from home and only some of the time. By the middle of April, half of U.S. employees were doing all of their work remotely, show finding from Sloan Review. Today each employee’s home is like a little data silo, complicating information sharing and data discovery.
“That’s not only terribly inefficient, it’s a horrible employee experience,” explained Robert Selvaraj, co-founder and CEO of SearchBlox. While not everyone who works from home today will always work remotely, experts predict we’ll never return to the level of co-located collaboration we were at prior to the pandemic. “This isn’t a temporary challenge,” Selvaraj explained. “We have to provide more efficient, more insightful search for enterprise employees.”
The lines between home and work are blurrier than ever, he continued. “So, your teams want the tools they use to do their jobs to be as intuitive and helpful as the ones they use in their personal lives.”
In other words, when they use enterprise search, employees want answers that are relevant, insight-driven, on-demand, and convenient, said Selvaraj.
“There’s no reason your customer experience has to be better than your employee experience,” continued Selvaraj. “You can use natural language processing, the technology that allows bots to understand and use human language, to improve the employee experience, too.”
SearchBlox builds intuitive and intelligent enterprise insight engines based on open-source technologies, simplifying search for complex enterprises.
