User intent is all about understanding a user’s goals based on their actions. You can easily see a user’s actions on your website: it’s not always so easy to divine their intentions. However, you can make an excellent guess at their goal with only information about their browsing behavior on your own website.
Capturing User Intent Through Search Queries
The best-understood method of capturing user intent is by deconstructing the language of their query. Search engines like Google use these techniques to provide results that match not only what you typed, but what you most likely meant. Intent analysis is the reason Google can provide such highly specific and useful search results for even the most carelessly assembled search string. If your website incorporates a search function, as most do, you can use the same search string analysis to determine your users’ intent.
This type of intent analysis requires complex mathematics, so it’s best undertaken by trained programmers. Let’s consider an example to understand the process.
An Illustrative Example
Imagine a user that types “returns” into your e-commerce website’s search box. What do you think they’re intending to find?
That user probably wants to return a product. As a human, that’s easy to discern, but a computer has no way to understand that. More than likely, it will cheerfully provide the user with a useless list of products that include the word “returns”, if any exist, frustrating the user and missing the point of the query entirely.
As a result, the user will be disappointed. You might say they have only themselves to blame: garbage in, garbage out, after all. However, you can always count on the generosity of users when they assign blame for their disappointments. Save yourself the grief by providing a link to the search results the user actually wanted: your returns page.
You can incorporate a similar functionality within Zoho CRM. By tracking user searches against unique user identifiers and comparing those to your CRM’s database, you can connect individual queries with individual people. Once that connection is established, their query language can be used to divine their intention. Are they searching for a product, a service, or something else? Do they look at high-value items or low-value items? It doesn’t take much creativity to see how quickly you can build a highly detailed picture of the user’s intentions and purpose on your site.
Customer Intent Without Search Boxes
Not every website has a search box. In fact, not every site needs a search box. So where else can we capture user intent?
User intent can also be determined based on the pages a user visits, the time they spend on those pages, and the actions they take while there. Do they linger over the page or scroll quickly to the bottom? Are they reading content, or skimming it? What about the page made it useful, or useless, to accomplish their goal?
If you use Google Analytics, this type of analysis is likely already baked into your tracking platform. You just need to get the information out of GA and into Zoho CRM. You can use GAConnector to pipe complete Google Analytics information to Zoho CRM or set up Zoho SalesIQ to use Zoho’s own web analytics package.
