Imagine you’re working with a product and are completely stumped. You’ve tried everything. Finally, in frustration, you go to the company’s website to look for answers. What greets you is a simple keyword search field. You enter a few terms that you think describe the problem, only to receive links to hundreds of topics. You scroll through the first page or two, maybe click a few links that are not helpful, and finally give up in frustration and call support.
Now, imagine you go to the company’s website and have a series of choices. You select the product, then the version, then the module, and so on until reaching the specific area that is causing problems. Perhaps now you can enter a keyword to search within that narrowed area. You receive a dozen links that are specific to the part of the product that you are struggling with. That’s manageable!
The best content in the world is no good if users can’t find it. If an answer is buried in an avalanche of content, it might as well not be there at all. How can you make sure your customers find the answers they need? This episode of IXIAtalks will help you understand how to leverage metadata to make your content searchable and findable, and how to use that same metadata to create a personalized customer experience (CX).
In this episode, Megan Gilhooly of Zoomin and Leigh White of IXIASOFT team up to explain how you can start by designing the optimum content search experience you’d like your customers to have. They will present examples of good and not-so-good taxonomies, and explain what makes them good or not. They will talk about the difference between marketing taxonomies and technical publication taxonomies, and give some tips on planning your taxonomy. The duo will also present methods for personalizing the CX using search weighting.
To make things a bit more concrete, Megan and Leigh will present one example of taxonomy development in the MadCap IXIA CCMS and how Zoomin can then leverage that taxonomy metadata to create a faceted search. They will also show how to manage multiple content versions in a taxonomy and control updates.
