Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Service XRG, a market research firm that focuses on the services industry, recently conducted a survey called “Influencing the Online Experience,” which examines how the web is changing the way businesses engage with customers and the impact online interactions have on shaping customer perceptions of companies. The survey was sponsored by InQuira, whose Customer Experience Platform software includes natural language processing, analytics, and knowledge management capabilities.

As it turns out, semantics can have a lot to do with whether or not a customer has a satisfying experience online.

“A lot of companies are moving their business online, so increasingly a larger percentage of customer touch-points, before or after the purchase for service, occur online,” says Tom Sweeny, principal and co-founder of Service XRG. “We find on the consumer side of the equation that customers accept and expect that. The rough points are between customer expectations for satisfying their intent and the ability of companies to actually deliver.”

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Where companies fall down is that consumers have a difficult time getting to the content they need at a company’s website to make a decision or solve a problem, even when they strongly suspect that information is there.

“You need the right information to satisfy a customer, but you have to know what the customer wants in order to serve up the right piece of information,” says Sweeny.

The typical approach for most companies is to push everyone down a particular path, rather than down a self-service path that is responsive to their particular needs. Think about search marketing, for example, says Jason Hekl, InQuira vp of corporate marketing. Companies spend millions of dollars on it, but when a user clicks on an ad, he may wind up at a landing page that assumes he is ready to buy the product or service, which isn’t always the case. Worse yet, there may be no road map helping him navigate how to get from that page to the information he really wants.

“So you squandered a potential opportunity,” Hekl says. “What is important in terms of engaging the customer is to design the web site through their lens. Every single consumer is an individual, and unless you can pull what his needs are and then respond dynamically to them, it is unlikely you will meet his expectations.”

How is it possible for a mass consumer web site to tack at the individual level? Consider the application of semantics to it. Hekl says that for many people, the semantic web translates to engines that understand language and apply it in a world wide web context.

“Natural language search, or a combination of search and browse, can create that [customer] engagement,” he says. He notes that InQuira’s Customer Experience Platform ships with a full natural language ontology for basic English as well industry level dictionaries (the word “stock,” for instance, means very different things to a bank vs. a manufacturing company). “We have productized intent as a piece of ontology, the idea being that in a corporate context you are using search as a dialog between the company and the user to determine what your user is trying to do so you can give him the information he needs to act.”

Smart companies will not only improve the customer experience by leveraging semantics in the search and browsing experience to intelligently serve up their own content, but also by leveraging the consumer-generated information that is now such a great part of the Web 2.0 world. “You need a mechanism to crawl and understand that content for meaning, but also cull from it, or harvest that knowledge that is most specific to solving customer problems,” says Hekl. “That’s where natural language and analytics comes into play: Understanding the behavior of the consumer for what it means, but also to index and understand their content for where it can be used, and bring the two together to come down to a compelling customer experience.”

The market hasn’t yet caught on to the fact that creating and searching information goes hand in hand with delivering a great online experience, says Hekl. “When you really survey them, a little over 31% [of companies] say they plan to implement enhanced search ability, but 97% are making content enhancements,” he says. “So that says to me that companies see these as two separate problems, vs. one problem around the customer experience.”

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