Legal and General

The Organization

Legal & General is a British multinational financial services company, headquartered in London. Its products include life insurance, general insurance, pensions and investments.

Legal & General was founded by six lawyers in a Chancery Lane coffee shop, in June 1836. Originally called the New Law Life Assurance Society, the society was restricted to those in the legal profession. Later this was opened up to the general public and the name was changed to Legal & General Life Assurance Society.

L&G prides itself on being able to offer expertise and financial solutions to customers throughout the various stages of life. It has operations in the United Kingdom, Egypt, France, Germany, the Gulf, India, the Netherlands and the United States. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and made a before tax operating profit of £1,087 million in 2012.

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Industry: Financial Services

Country: United Kingdom

Website

www.legalandgeneral.com

Features

Search Powered Content
Content Classifier
Content Mobifier

Key Project Objectives

Improve user experience
Index a multitude of separate systems
Personalized and flexible local directory
Guide users to the right content

The Solution

Funnelback was implemented across all L&G systems.

Funnelback provides a dynamically updated search template with a logical programmatic language called Freemarker, which ensures that navigational components of the site are kept up to date on the search page, and makes it easier to maintain.

The L&G web team was happy to be able to move from an XSLT style sheet based template system to a more natural HTML/CSS editing environment.

Contextual navigation

Enables users to see search results related to their query, whilst also being provided with a list of contextually relevant sub-topic suggestions which can be used to refine their search.
Faceted navigation

Uses structured information, such as metadata, to filter search results by any number of factors such as file types, language, site section, repository etc to provide faster and more refined search results.
Synonyms

Enabling this feature allows terms to be expanded to increase the number of search results or increase search relevance for semantically linked terms.

Funnelback allows us to see clearly what we need to do next and we’re working with Funnelback to fine tune our search and get the customers the results they’re looking for first time round.
Dan Foster Legal and General

Technical Specifications

Funnelback v11 implemented, and since upgraded to v15:

Internet search: 17 searches across 36 collections.
Intranet search: Internally hosted installation of Funnelback providing intranet search capability for the first time.
L&G were impressed by the in-built Funnelback SEO Auditor, which gives a ranking summary, guidelines for optimising the ranking and ability to share optimization reports with non-administrator

The Results

Customers are also benefiting from a wholly better search experience, including ensuring customers searching the main L&G site are able to find content that is housed on smaller microsites.

For instance, a person wanting to opt-out of a pension will now be guided to the correct website where they will find the information needed. This capability is powered by the Funnelback best-bets system. The need for this facility was recognised by L&G after review of Funnelback’s easy to use reports outlining top searches and searches which triggered additional searches or excessive pagination.

In total there are now eighteen searches powering a superior search facility on the L&G website delivering auto-suggestion, automated spelling correction and dynamic search results.