One Search To Rule Them All – An Introduction To Global Search

Most organizations today deploy a “best-of-breed” infrastructure, meaning that they use the best software that solves a specific business problem really well. These systems typically aim to include member management, payment gateways, event registration and more all in one platform. While these tools have many advantages, there are a few problems.

• Information is scattered across multiple systems
• Related conversations are happening on multiple channels 
• Users need to go to multiple systems to get the full picture on a topic

Association members frequently come to the website of an association using the website search. Usually, they only see pages within the CMS that have that specific keyword. Many times, they may be searching for one of their LMS offerings or an event session. This information is not available in the website search, thus frustrating the member and forcing them to create a support request.

Association staff struggle to find information easily on their back office systems right now. They typically rely on the AMS or CRM for information, but that doesn’t give them a Customer 360 view of the member. This also doesn’t capture all of the communication, both internal and external, thats happening on multiple channels such as Chat, Email, Office Documents, and the CRM.

An ideal solution to this problem is to create a single easy to use search that combines data from all different systems. This solution provides a single search interface, which searches across all of the platforms that are being used in the organization.

We can implement functionality like this with ElasticSearch. With Elastic Search, we can implement a cloud based Google-like search interface that can search across multiple data sources, and present a single unified result. Furthermore, the search interface can function as its own website, or can instead be incorporated into any existing system like a CMS or a CRM.

We implemented this within fusionSpan and combined all our data sources including Google Apps, Slack, Zoom, Asana, JIRA, Confluence and are adding more.

Conversations for a single client or project are happening on multiple channels – some of these channels like Slack are internal facing, while others like Asana as external/client facing. This has given our staff a singular search to search all their content buckets.

Elastic Search comes with dozens of built in connectors that can connect to different sources like Slack and Dropbox. fusionSpan can also add custom data sources like Salesforce etc, with over 200 connectors we have featured on our fusionConnect Platform.

We can also provide a single search engine that can be integrated into an internal staff accessible system like Salesforce CRM, and an external customer facing system like a website.