AI-Powered Search Into Your Lightning Community

AI is all the buzz. Companies know they need it, they are joining in on the hype, but are still somewhat unsure of what it’s all about and its ability to impact their bottom line. While AI comes in many different forms, there’s one that enterprises should particularly familiarize themselves with: AI-powered search. It is the single, most important tool that enables organizations to get to know their customers on a personal level and deliver the contextually relevant experiences they want.
 

Why use AI-powered search?

AI-powered search may not be stealing the headlines, but it’s consistently delivering on its promise to drive staggering results and has transformed the customer experiences of some of today’s leading brands. Search is no longer just a box with a flashing cursor, it is a journey —one that your customers want to go on.
 

Every one of your customers is different, with different queries, preferences and vocabulary. AI-powered search seamlessly understands your customer’s true intent provides them with the right information that enables them to successfully self-serve, and enjoy the journey.
 

In short, AI-powered search is your ticket to a personalized customer experience and healthy community.

As organizations look to provide ever-smarter and more engaging self-serve resources to their customers, partners, and employees, Salesforce Communities have enables organizations to build a dynamic customer, partner or employee community on the Salesforce platform. Prior to this, it required some technical skill, as the only options were to use some combo of Force.com, VisualForce, and Apex code. That all changed in 2015 when Salesforce announced Lightning Community Builder, a completely new framework for building Communities.
 

The Lightning Community Builder is a serious game changer

With Lightning Community Builder, Salesforce didn’t simply try to make Community layouts easier to edit; they built a whole new, “componentized” framework.  Each of these components provides a unique set of capabilities, and community managers and admins can now simply drag and drop components onto their pages to deliver those capabilities to members precisely how and where they want them.
 

Even cooler, Salesforce architected Lightning so AI-powered search providers, like Coveo, could build new components to extend the power of the Lightning framework. And with the launch of the AppExchange for Components, Salesforce has created a marketplace for third-party components that gives community managers fast access to a whole bunch of cool capabilities they can easily integrate without help from their IT department or system integrator.
 

Benefits of AI-powered Search for Salesforce Users

To put it simply, AI-powered search basically turns Salesforce into your single “window” to enterprise content. For instance, if you’re looking to implement Salesforce but are uncertain on how to migrate legacy data,AI-powered search for Salesforce can index it.
 

Here’s how it works:  
 

AI-powered search recommends helpful content and surfaces relevant content to users (community members, support analysts, etc.) based upon their unique context or case-at-hand. This can be done inside Service Cloud, Community Cloud or Platform.
 

The search functionality provides the usage analytics that admins need to understand what articles, docs, and videos are actually driving self-service on the Community and case resolution in the contact center–and can even be integrated with Wave Analytics.
 

As Coveo President and CTO, Laurent Simoneau, says, “Technology companies must offer a solution with the capabilities and ease of use needed to truly optimize self-service experiences and applications.”