The CX Blog

We are dynamic iterative contextual searchers.  No matter how you slice it, that’s what we humans are.  It’s how we shop, it’s how we surf, it’s how most of us organize our lives.

We look for what we think we want, only to find our original ideas about what we want changing as we find more stuff.  The pile of stuff self-organizes over time, traffic and language patterns change and evolve over time.  This process is truly mind-boggling with today’s search engines.

XML and related mark-up and meta-tagging languages indulge this contextual search very well.

Contextual markup is the thing.

Being able to attach context to the string of letters that make up a word lets us search for meaning rather than pattern matching.  And the meaning can improve incrementally through a text search so that you or I can make sure that the meta-tags we’re using are pretty close, if not spot-on, to the text searches others are performing.

In a help desk environment, or a support environment, whether online or live, this ability to refine through actual use patterns make contextual markup languages like xml a god-send.  Your KM team then moves into the facilitation role, watching the patterns, suggesting and creating meta-tagging schemas to help agents and customers find what they want using language they themselves understand. They can search for meaning rather than having to abide by an external organizing architecture.

Enlightenment.