The EUM Website. Now Powered by Azure AI Search. And Why it Matters.

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We’ve updated our website with our latest EUM platform 7, which has brought along with it a number of significant enhancements.  The most important enhancement has been the integration of Azure AI Search. 

Does AI Powered Search Matter? 

You might be wondering if AI Search is even necessary on a company website.  Is search even necessary? 

If it’s well structured, a good website should intuitively help visitors find the content they are looking for with as few clicks as possible.  With a small amount of content a menu directory is sufficient, but when you have large amounts of content like we do, it frustrates users when there is no way to quickly find what they need.  So search functionality can improve the user experience when it comes to large article repositories, in-depth support knowledge bases, and staff directories.  

Without a search function, those frustrated users will take other actions. Like going somewhere else for the data they need, or calling into your tech support lines.

So search is needed, but comes with drawbacks. 

  1. Can slow down the site: Especially with large databases and other integrated functions like chatbots, a search function can add weight to a site, reduce performance, and harm SEO results. 
  2. Cannot search in context:   Meaning a search function on a website can’t generally intuit the user intent (ie - looking for an event vs looking for an article, or looking for support instead of a general article).  
  3. Search ineffectiveness:  Depending on the search function used and the CMS in question some search tools will miss content.  Many users may just default to using google to search a website in that case.  

The Opportunity with Azure AI Search

Given our ability to integrate with the Azure AI Search service, we were able to build our website’s search functionality with AI Search’s capabilities, which addresses some of these challenges. 

  1. It’s lightweight:  Our Google Pagespeed rating went from 64 to 92, and a big part of that was rebuilding the website to leverage search-based content rendering with the Azure AI Search integration in our own EUM Publisher.
  2. Full Context Search: Users can find the content they are looking for faster, use natural language queries, and find content related to their location on the site. For example, if they are on the events page using the search bar on that page, they will only get search results for events. You can see more about this in “Harnessing the Power of Azure OpenAI and AI Search.” 
  3. Publishable Knowledge Base:  Our support knowledge base is currently hosted in ZenDesk, but our plan is to migrate that content into our website so it becomes fully searchable, making our vast technical knowledge more accessible to our users.
  4. Foundation for Azure OpenAI Chat:  In short order, we will be building out automated chat functionality, where users can chat natively with our website and get answers to questions, as if they were talking to one of our sales reps or one of our support technicians.  Instead of just providing the article, it will answer their questions directly, and remember their input, allowing them to get the support they need immediately without waiting for a human response.   And the chat record will be stored in our support database, so if they do need to talk to someone, that person will be able to pick up where the AI chat left off.  

Azure AI Search Integration - A Deliberate Choice

It was a deliberate choice to use Azure AI Search, primarily because of some of the advanced features like specialized contextually accurate answers and enterprise app integrations that will extend our future functionality.  You can see more about why this makes sense in our “Bing Chat Enterprise vs Azure OpenAI: A Comparative Analysis” article.  

We’ve put a lot of work into this update, and while the site “looks” the same, the implementation of our platform 7 features including Azure AI Search integration has vastly improved the site performance and your user experience.  

We invite you to take a look around and try it out.

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