Here’s a breakdown of how Coveoans use Slack, and the search obstacles they represent. Why is Slack content different from other content, and why does this present such an interesting indexing challenge? Because we use Slack in many different ways. This represents some challenges for adding it to an enterprise search engine, which we’ll review in detail.
To understand a message and its impact, you need to understand the context around it-where the message is from, who’s talking to whom, for which project, when was that said, etc.
On the other hand, conversational documents-and more specifically Slack messages-depend on each other because they are part of a conversation. In other words, you don’t need a second YouTube video to understand another. These types of search results don’t rely on each other to be relevant and useful. Not their content, of course, but rather the fact that they are self-contained-in that each are relevant individually and can live by themselves in a search page.
This requires connectors to the data sources you want to index-such as Dropbox, Salesforce, YouTube, Jira, Google Drive, Twitter and many more-and a way to display that content to the right person at the right time using powerful AI technologies.Īll these sources of information have something in common. The promise of enterprise search is that you can search everything. conventional search? Self-Contained vs Conversational Content There are many considerations regarding what content to index, and when it comes to Slack content, these considerations can be especially tricky.īut first, what are the particularities of conversational search vs. While some companies may think that the more information you find in a search page, the better it is, that’s not quite true. Others might want to help their employees get more context around some files or projects stored in company systems like project trackers or intranets-for example, a side discussion regarding a Google Slides presentation stored in Google Drive.
Slack download conversation upgrade#
In a workplace context, companies might want to upgrade their self-service portal by allowing their employees to browse HR updates or IT announcements posted within Slack. Giving agents access to an advanced conversational search engine inside a company CRM (such as Salesforce) can help save time-and ultimately improve the overall customer experience. In a customer service context, indexing an instant message platform allows for agent swarming to surface past insights that impact a current case (customer issue) or a product. For example, here at Coveo we’ve generated over 500,000 messages just in the last 30 days (someone’s been working on the weekends!). There’s a wealth of valuable information nested in Slack channels, threads and messages. The stellar UX design team here at Coveo did some research and revealed some pretty fascinating results. Introducing chat messaging into enterprise search results presents a whole new type of content that needs to be considered carefully and displayed a little differently. It’s such a household name that the term itself is a commonly used verb (though it holds the exact opposite meaning of its traditional dictionary definition).Īs an increasing number of companies transition to either hybrid or remote offices, employee swarming is an emerging best practice for virtual workplace collaboration. Probably as of 2019, the popular instant message provider reported 10+ million daily active users in 150+ countries.