Questions vs topics/key words only

Making some changes to our library and my team raised an interesting proposal: what if instead of filling the question field of Q+As solely with questions, we instead filled them topics/key words?

So our question that is: "Describe the capabilities of your mobile app." would then look something like: "Technology | Mobile app | Functionality, capabilities"

Has anyone done anything like this?

Comments

Kristin James

Hi Jain,

I LOVE that you posted this question because this is something I thought about recently as well.

What prompted it was working with our Opportunity Support team, who uses RFPIO to manage/fill out questionnaires. Questionnaires are always using the same language, which doesn't include fully written out questions. By putting topics and keywords in the question field, it makes it easier for the Recommendation Engine to pull in the correct information without getting easily confused.

We haven't tried this on a large scale just yet, but in my mind this would make Auto Respond more accurate as well.

Jain Willis

Kristin, glad we're not the only ones thinking about this!

I've noticed the Recommendation Engine getting hung up on the wrong words in our existing questions (focusing on "describe" instead of "mobile app") so this might be a way to counteract that.

Unfortunately, we don't see the same questions all the time like you. Clients send us some truly bonkers questions! We have trouble trying to match what they are asking with the questions saved in our library, but I think that is always going to be a struggle, no matter if we continue using questions vs key words.

Agree that it would help with Auto Respond, but my team is scared of Auto Respond and won't use it!

christina jacobsen

Hi,

I am wondering where you are now with perhaps changing your questions into topics? I am considering doing the same thing, as we also cannot always match client questions with our saved pairs. Thanks for sharing :-)

Helene H

Have any of you checked out adding Stop Words via the Organization Settings - Content Library - Preferences? I have found success with clients who add custom stop words for certain words are always being pulled or specific to their organization.

A great example is a client who always uses "Firm", they added that as a Stop Word and their results improved dramatically!

Jain Willis

Hi Christina!

Yes, we actually are implementing this in our library. It's a bit slow going, but we think it's going to work out really well (I can report back in a few months once our changes are live and being used).

We decided to change the main question into a key word/phrase, then use the alternate questions to keep a few questions that we KNOW we see regularly (deleted any other ones) and also add additional key words to help find the question.

The stop words is a good suggestion, thank Helene! We are also building out our related words. For example, in our industry people will use "service anniversary," "career achievement," "career milestone," "service award," and "years of service" all for the same thing, so we want to try and capture that.

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