Phone Direct Answer Investigation

Search Search - Search Quality Recommendations & Trouble
1

Hi Team,

A client of mine is trying to get the “mainPhone” field working as a direct answer on their Answers experience - allowing users to run queries like “What is the phone number for the St. Albans store?” and get a direct answer.

Now the issue is that this particular client works in the Telecomunications industry and thus its biggest products, which are also included on the Answers experience, are mobile phones. As a result we have a few synonyms setup to ensure queries for “Phone” returns the products vertical and thus the associated mobile phones.

I think this synonym is causing issues with the direct answer not working correctly, so I just wanted to start this post to crowdsource some ideas of how we could combat this. We still want the products vertical to function as is, but we also now want to get the “mainPhone” direct answer working as expected.

2

Hey Scott - what prediction mode are you using for field value direct answers? We recently released a feature that allows you to customize the behavior of field value direct answers to make the more show more often, if that suits your use case.

It sounds like you might be using the One Entity heuristic which is the most conservative and only shows direct answers if the search resolves to one entity. Try using either the Classifier mode, which uses an NLP classifier to detect whether or not the user is seeking a direct answer, or the Field Name mode, which shows a direct answer whenever a field name is detected.