Search Term Analysis

Goal

Track the support team's writing time to identify areas needing more content coverage for products or features, including additional articles, improved agent training, or enhanced ticket templates.

My Role

Knowledge Manager responsible for reporting and identifying knowledge gaps and outdated content — I reviewed the search term reports, assessed their usefulness, and fed findings into content planning decisions.

Context

Company Size: Enterprise

Role: Knowledge Manager

Period: 2024

Team: 1 KB Manager + 2 Assistants + ~10 Contributors

Toolkit: Oracle CX, 5 sites

Library Scale: 1,300 knowledge articles covering 20 products, catering 5 regions.

Constraints

Search term data was available, but it was hard to act on. Most customers searched with just 1–3 words, and since the product catalog had many products with similar-sounding features, the same search terms kept showing up across unrelated products. For example, fax relates to both the fax service in VoIP telephony and fax-to-email configuration in Exchange Mail Server. Even trickier: phone call features in the VoIP service and in the Call Center solution are nearly identical in description, but users need different settings, legal terms, and limits. There wasn't enough information in short queries to tell what a specific customer was actually looking for.

What I Did

I mentioned in the internal discussion that search term reports provide very little value due to the short queries that most readers perform and product overlap. I emphasized the importance of adding auto-completion to the search input on our Support Center website, which would allow readers to create more specific queries and improve data usability. The feature was later prioritized as part of the RAG rollout planning, ensuring that not only the traditional search bar, but also the RAG, received the product name.

Lessons Learned

I learned that identifying and explaining the problem is not enough to get it fixed; it is also necessary to brainstorm possible solutions, estimate the resources required, and try to connect the solution to something that is already a high-priority project. Even so, the issue may be delayed for months or years while more visible projects are completed.