SoftwareOne partner story
We get you the right search result 98% of the time
The Danish tech entrepeneour Raffle. AI is partnering with SoftwareOne (formerly Crayon) to tell the world why its AI-based search solution is more than a game-changer: it reinvents the game
The tech entrepreneur Suzanne Lauritzen was so frustrated by traditional search she decided to do something about it. A year after selling LogBuy to Visma, she got together with Ole Winter, a professor at the Technical University of Denmark, to create a very different kind of search engine.
This is what they brought to market in 2018 as Raffle.AI with Lauritzen as CEO, and Winter as Chief Research Officer.
So in what way does Raffle.AI transform search and by extension, customer service?
“This sounds revolutionary, and it is, but Raffle.AI does not take words into account at all,” says Lauritzen.
This is not the world as we know it because traditional search systems are built on a dictionary model. The search recognizes a word (or words) and looks for this word in the Content Management System of the interrogated site. The more often a word occurs in any given document, the likelier it is to be ranked in your top five results. It is as basic as it sounds, and not especially effective.
- Client
- Raffle.AI
- Industry
- Information technology
- Platform
- Azure Cloud
- Services
- Software Development
We know that whatever we built it had to break with traditional search and be wholly based on Artificial Intelligence – and not just have an AI ‘component’ added on as an afterthought.
CEO Raffle.AI
Open-source solutions such as Elastic, Lucene, Coveo, and Algolia – “There are many others, but they all work in the same way” – perform poorly as standard, with just 16 out of 100 searches supplying the correct answer in their top five results.
“You can improve the score by tweaking your data. You can teach your search platform to understand synonyms, and recognize common misspellings,” adds Lauritzen. “This is the AI component ‘powering’ your search. After a lot of painstaking work, usually manual, your score generally goes up to 42 out of 100 – but it never gets above that.
“With Raffle.AI you get 82 out of the box, and it caps out 97 or 98 – usually with no or little human intervention.”
Raffle.AI achieves its performance but looking at meaning not words. If you search for “support” – a common query – it will take you directly to the company support page, which is where you want to go. Traditional search has no regard for meaning and so its results – a list of documents that contain the word “support” – are meaningless.
This is damaging. Irrelevant search results create customer friction, reflect badly on your brand, and have a negative impact on conversion. “Secondly,” adds Lauritzen, “if you can’t find what you’re looking for you’re more likely to call the customer support.”
Because Raffle.AI is radically better at giving customers and citizens the information that they need through search, the demand for call center support falls back. The results vary from sector to sector, but Lauritzen has seen a reduction in calls of up to 46 percent. “But you also get 18 percent,” she adds, “it depends on the complexity of the data. The average number we like to cite is a reduction of 30 to 32 percent in the volume of calls. This is huge. For utilities, especially during those hectic five days in the month when their bills go out, this is the difference between a smooth service and a stressful near meltdown.”
Utilities, telecoms, government websites, banks, pension funds, or generally any organization with a lot of content and complexity form Raffle.AI’s main customer base.
Because Raffle.AI is radically better at giving customers and citizens the information that they need through search, the demand for call center support falls back.
CEO, Raffle.AI
Replacing a traditional Open Source-based search with Raffle.AI is easy and can usually be completed in under 24 hours.
“That’s foundational to our product, that it should be a plug-and-play solution. And this is achievable because it’s based on AI. Traditional search or chatbot systems are never plug-and-play because they have to be taught what to do. Raffle.AI can be up and running in one hour if you have a small amount of data but even for complex cases we deliver within a day.”
Raffle.AI comes out of the box with a chat assistant that is built on top of its AI search and leverages Raffle’s own large language model to engage visitors in human-like conversation, “like a ChatGPT for business”.
The bulk of Raffle.AI customers are based in the Nordics, but it also has customers in North America and several key European markets. The barrier to wider adoption – and the only barrier – is that Raffle.AI as of now lacks extensive global visibility.
“This is the reason we partnered with SoftwareOne,” says Lauritzen, “because you are global. We want to leverage all the opportunities you offer through the Innovation Hub, and we recently participated in a great SoftwareOne event in Copenhagen. But we already dominate the market in Denmark and the Nordics and are looking at a global horizon.
“We have a great story to tell,” concludes Lauritzen, “and we believe that SoftwareOne is the global megaphone to spread our message.”
