Case Study: Mid-Sized Hardware and Software Manufacturer

Search Technologies helps a mid-sized manufacturing company reduce growing pains, lower costs and eliminate complexity with Google Search Appliance

BACKGROUND
This privately-owned, 1,500 person computer hardware and software manufacturer has experienced 10% year-over-year revenue growth. The company licensed one of the top three enterprise search products to support both their internal and public-facing search needs, but found that a great deal of fine-tuning was needed to achieve good search results, and the effort required to manage other parts of the system left little or no time for relevance tuning.

CHALLENGES
A management review after three years working with the leading enterprise search product showed disappointing results:

• There was overall disappointment in search relevance by sales, education and especially technical support staff.
• Users observed that searching their own public website using goole.com yielded better results than using the search engine built into the site.
• The search support team had spent substantial amount of time in integration activity and therefore lacked the resources to work on search relevance.
• The search support team felt that even if given adequate time, they did not have the expertise in-house to perform complex relevance tuning required by the existing search solution. 
• A plan to extend search and support capability to Asia was delayed due to the cost and effort required to support good quality search in Japanese and other Asian languages.

One of the most obvious “pain points” in the company was the technical support organization. With the increase in customers, headcount in the company’s technical support department had grown by 20%, while revenue growth in that part of the business had increased by only 15%. Support analysts noted difficulty in retrieving information about past support incidents and locating other information that would help them resolve support cases more rapidly. While buying more cubicles and other equipment for the support group was easy, provisioning them with the right tools for finding information was much more of a challenge.

Clearly, a strategic decision on search technology was needed, and the company contacted Search Technologies to advise them on their search strategy.

SEARCH TECHNOLOGIES SOLUTION
Search Technologies made an objective assessment of the company’s search requirements, existing solution, and other business factors, and recommended Google Search Appliance (GSA). In addition, Search Technologies provided a phased plan for transitioning to GSA which included these steps:

Phase 1:    Implement GSA on public-facing technical support website.

Phase 2:    Implement GSA on internal repositories that support technical support analysts.

Phase 3-n:    Roll out phased implementations for additional business groups and international regions in subsequent phases.

Search Technologies worked on-site to assist with a smooth transition to GSA. Following the Search Technologies plan, the company received immediate benefits from the switch to GSA:

• From a cost perspective, first-year savings on IT support personnel alone were enough to justify the switch to GSA.
• “Out-of-the-box” search relevance proved superior to the previous search solution, so the pressure to spend large amounts of time on search relevance tuning was removed.The company anticipates that their technical support operation will benefit in two ways:
  • A reduced support load based on better search on the public technical support site.
  • More efficient handling of support calls due to better search.

FUTURE ENHANCEMENTS
With the successful transition to GSA, the company is now in position to make optimal use of its existing content, and managers can focus on new content that will help to fuel additional growth. Business owners will focus on gaining a better understanding of their Web traffic and applying search engine optimization techniques that will apply both to their internal and external websites. In addition, this company is not confident that they can extend search support to their international offices and distributors.