Why is Conversational Search becoming increasingly important?
A few months ago I wrote a piece on a) how users interact with NLU devices b) how voice search plays a part and c)how companies can leverage it to increase user engagement for their products or services.
It got some great feedback and led to further investigation into NLU capabilities. Is there a blurring of lines between voice search and on-site search and is NLU playing a big part in the blurring of these lines?
If you look at on-site search experiences now, most companies tend to treat search as a transactional activity with the experience directing users to ask specific queries with the hope of finding specific answers. One of the main issues here is that it can become very unnatural and we need to work hard to ensure we’re creating a robust human-software interaction. Building a solid engaging query autosuggestion function can be time consuming and at the end of the day it isn’t very focused on the specific user. These features tend to be an accumulation of all user data and lack personalisation and context.
We’re in an age now where we’re moving from queries to journeys. We need to move away from back and forth answers to helping users on their journey. There is a need to share new features that help users resume tasks where they left off, keep track of items and content that they found useful, and get relevant suggestions of actions they may perform next in the journey. All of these are key elements of a conversational search experience.
All of this marks transformation away from transactional experiences to immersive conversational experiences that greatly increase user engagement and satisfaction.
Companies need to think across platforms and devices. The search experiences not only need to become personalised and context-based but also multi-device. Doing so will allow users to more effectively interact with businesses throughout any part of their day be it on their phone, laptop or even in their car.
In the next post I’ll look to provide some colour on what features can support a conversational search experience.
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