Has anyone set up Drift with a federated search engine like Algolia, Coveo, or Elasticsearch? We are looking at getting a federated search tool so our customers can search our product documentation, support articles, community posts, product training, and our website from a single search location and we’d love for our chat bot to also be able to provide this type of search functionality. I know there are pre-built integrations with Zendesk and oder products like that, and it looks like there is a decent API that maybe could be used for this. I’m just wondering if anyone has actually done it.
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Hey Pat! This is Alex from Drift’s product team. This is a timely ask, as it is something we have been talking about pursuing recently…
We’re currently exploring options that are a bit more ChatGPT-like, where site visitors can type in a keyword, question, or phrase, and the Drift widget would generate a response based on the content you have sync’d with Drift (along with the respective source content). This content could be based on a variety of sources in order to ensure that the responses generated are accurate and as exhaustive as possible.
We’re interested in this approach, as our aim is to help shoppers work more efficiently as they shop for new products and services; moving towards an answers-focused search solution (versus providing exclusively search results) helps accomplish just that and is ultimately where we see major value for both shoppers and marketers. Not to mention, this approach is something we’re seeing more and more of (e.g. Google is now providing answers to search queries, not just raw results/content matches) and we expect increasingly more shoppers to expect this behavior when searching for specifics.
Would love to get your thoughts on this approach! Again, this is something we’re actively exploring, so your input would be very valuable.
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Hi Alex, thanks so much for your response. What you’re outlining here sounds great and definitely inline with how I think the future of AI driven chatbots/search/customer and prospect help is going to play out.
I think, however, this is a bit beyond what my question actually was, which likely means I didn’t ask my question well.
What I was looking for was whether anyone had integrated a fed search tool in a similar manner as the existing Zendesk integration that searches and returns content from Zendesk articles. I’m wondering if the Drift API would allow for this integration, but I’m not enough of an API geek to know just be reading through the documentation.
While I would LOVE to have that conversational AI functionality you’re talking about, Alex (and happy to discuss that further with you at any time), for right now all I want is our customers to be able to come to our site, ask a question in the chatbot like “how do you connect to Google Drive” and have the chat bot return a link to our product documentation on connecting to Google Drive, a link to a post in our Community, and a link to a lesson in our online University. All content that has been indexed by a fed search tool. Does that make sense?
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That makes complete sense, Pat. I am not personally familiar with anyone having set that up, but I think it’s something we can keep in mind as we build out the aforementioned feature we’re working towards. Ultimately, we would want the source content to accompany any response provided so that the searcher can easily review the relevant/supporting content themselves. So I actually might expect the end result to have some overlap with what you’re describing. Maybe we find some way to configure responses to include a synthesized answer or just source content.
Would ultimately love to get your thoughts on some of this when we get closer to development, so be on the lookout from a message from me in the not-too-distant future!
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