The Benefits Of Custom Search In Telehealth, EdTech, Media & Retail

No two industries are the same. A medical center will have a vastly different metric of success than a retail outlet, and a media blogging site will judge its achievements quite differently than a company that focuses on edtech. But, however an industry measures its success, they have one major commonality — they want to deliver whatever product or service a person came to them for. This is why it’s so incredibly important for any industry to incorporate intelligent, intuitive custom search on its landing page. Here are 4 examples of how custom search can help companies in Telehealth, edtech, media, and retail.

TeleHeath

The goal of any TeleHealth company is to help people get (or stay) healthy. Lineate has previously written on how the Coronavirus pandemic has magnified the need for telehealth, and the common problems and solutions that the medical industry must face to successfully treat their patients remotely. One of the most important aspects of telehealth is getting a patient to the right information or medical professional as quickly and accurately as possible. For most people (heck, maybe all people), seeking medical help is a stressful experience, and a smart site search can ease the pain. 

For instance, a site search with typo-tolerance, can accurately guess what a patient needs regardless of spelling of grammar errors, which is quite helpful for patients delirious with fever, or patients of whom english is not a native language. Custom site searches can also use natural language processing (NLP) to learn how people are asking for information, and point them in the right direction no matter how it is asked. For instance, a search query would take the patient who types the word ‘fever’ to the same place as the person who wrote ‘elevated temperature.’ 

And with telemedicine on the rise, it becomes increasingly important for patients to find the right medical professional. A site with customizable searches can allow patients to search for doctors by symptoms, speciality, insurance coverage, time, or any other parameter (or combination of parameters) that may be logistically important. This way, a patient can book an appointment with the right medical professional at the right time, without the hassle of scrolling through directories and negotiating with overworked staff.

Edtech

Even before the pandemic, the education technology industry has exploded in recent years, with 92% of teachers believing that tech will have a major impact in the way they teach. And with many students learning remotely due to the pandemic, having a clear, intuitive system is more important than ever. While there are many different areas that fit under the edtech umbrella, let’s focus on how teachers and students share assignments. 

As the school year wears on, it can be overwhelming to both educators and students to keep track of past assignments. This is why it is so important for edtech companies to use custom search technology in their systems. Customizable searches can allow teachers to search by student, assignment, subject, grade, date, or even by common core standard. This helps teachers stay organized on both the student-facing and bureaucracy-facing side of their job. Students can also have access to many of these custom search parameters, helping them keep track of their assignments and their grades.

Then, of course, there is ADA (American Disabilities Act) and IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Act) compliance, which Lineate has covered in a previous blog. Remote learning can be the most deleterious to students with special needs, but properly calibrated edtech can be used to tremendous effects for these individuals. Search functionality can be tailored to the best way students can receive information (for instance, through voice-activated text) and send students to extra scaffolding that best fits their IEP (individualized Education Plan).

Media

Whether your media company specializes in scholarly articles, news, or video entertainment, chances are, your website is constantly churning out new material. This means that older material is constantly swept away, which can be annoying to users looking for something in particular. 

Much like TeleHealth, media site searches would greatly benefit from having typo-tolerance and customizable searches. For instance, if a person doesn’t remember the title of a particular article, she can search in combination of subject and date and find what she is looking for. 

For visual media, information is sometimes entered on a remote control or phone, which takes up valuable time. Autocomplete suggestions and type-ahead suggestions for long queries based on popularity (or, better yet, data incorporated from a user profile) can give a user the video he is looking for one or two letters into his search.

It’s also extremely important for media sites to never give a user a ‘query not found’-type message. By organizing your site search into metadata categories, searches can generate highly relevant suggestions even if it does not find exactly what the user is looking for.

Retail

E-commerce companies must do everything in their power to make the shopping process as easy, fun and fast as possible, because if there are any bumps in the road, your potential customers will take their money elsewhere. It’s important to note that, according to a Salesforce study, shoppers that use website searches spend an average of 2.6 times more than shoppers that do not. A great site search can be the difference between a thriving business and a shuttered warehouse.

To see how extremely important a great site search is, look to Amazon (which we did in a previous article). They utilize and constantly improve their site search, incorporating typo-tolerance, autocomplete suggestions, multi-category search, and a sturdy, data-driven back-end that offers custom suggestions for products, constantly evolving to give the best shopping experience as new data points set in. Usually advice like “be like Amazon” is counter-productive, but when it comes to intelligent site search, it is both necessary and surprisingly easy to do.

How Lineate Can Help

Lineate’s Custom Search Solution is uniquely developed based on your industry, whether it is health, edtech, media, or retail, and will perfectly fit your website’s design and structure. Tailor your package to match your search needs — improve your customer search success rate and get maximum ROI. To learn more about custom site search, read our free eBook, How To Raise The Bar With Custom Search, and if you would like to learn more about our custom site search solutions, reach out today!