Connecting People and Information: The National Instruments Story

Looking for a search solution that could power their e-commerce, Intranet, and CRM experiences, National Instruments wanted to optimize the online shopping experience and foster collaboration and engagement across the workforce.

National Instruments is among the innovators that put search at the core of its systems, including digital commerce, the website, intranets, and CRM.

Search at the Core of UX

Site search needs to offer capabilities that continually improve the relevancy of answers to search queries. It needs to consider language on global websites, and it must be personalized as much as possible to the visitor requesting the information.

Three key capabilities improve the relevancy of search experiences: text analytics, natural language processing, and machine learning. You find these in cognitive solutions for site search (like Attivio). 

What were the key features that set the Attivio Platform apart for NI? First, NI is a global company, with a global workforce, so the ability to provide highly relevant information to its employees, in their own language, was crucial for the intranet. In addition, features such as ontology-driven type ahead and ‘did you mean,' as well as reliable, tunable relevancy were critical to optimizing the user experience, particularly for the website and digital commerce.

And the technical perspective? One thing Attivio was able to do was eliminate the flattening of data (which most search solutions must do to ingest relational data). The Attivio Platform can retain relationships, and with a patented JOIN operator can correlate and present all related structured data and unstructured content.

“Our CRM data often includes several contact names for a given customer, but we were limited to just one contact name due to data flattening. Also, if our sales department revised sales territories, we’d have to reload large databases (6 to 7 million records) to reflect those changes. The Attivio Platform does not require the flattening of data and will alleviate these issues,” said Kenn North Senior Product Manager, Search National Instruments.

Thinking Outside the Textbox

Increasing engagement is the focus of many marketers with their digital properties. To increase engagement, you must provide a contextual experience.

Search solutions should do much more than provide a set of answers to a keyword search. When you combine text analytics, natural language processing and machine learning you can understand and predict what visitors are looking for even before they realize it increasing engagement dramatically.

National Instruments was able to deliver a more engaging search experience using Attivio’s site search solution that goes beyond the traditional search box -- one that delivers highly relevant search for customers and its global workforce. To learn more, read the case study.