Search is one of those things you don’t notice when it works — and can’t ignore when it doesn’t.
At Lexmark, that pain point became too loud to ignore. As Director of Digital Marketing Mike Dattilo put it, “enterprise search was a struggle for us.” Search is a strategic pillar of the digital experience, but navigating the sea of AI vendors and vague value props makes it tough to know who’s truly capable of driving results. That’s why Lexmark didn’t just pick a vendor — leaders there chose a strategic partner to elevate customer experience and future-proof their tech investment.
I had the opportunity to speak with Dattilo during a webinar session to get a peek behind the curtain of Lexmark’s process of updating search on the company’s websites — what wasn’t working, how internal momentum was built, and what finally tipped the scale toward Coveo.
Counting the True Cost of Outdated Search Engines
Many teams fall into the trap of seeing open-source or legacy search engines as a “free” solution. Dattilo’s team knew better.
“There’s a lot of effort on creating a site index, getting those site indexes updated, creating some sort of relevancy within your search results, even just trying to get content indexed correctly,” he said.
Dattilo continued, “We were spending a lot of development time just keeping the search experience active and trying to make it somewhat functional. This, number one, kept us away from other priorities that we really wanted to focus on making better user experiences. And ultimately didn’t deliver the search experience that our customers were looking for.”
Relevant reading: Build vs Buy Search? Choosing the Best Path for Your Enterprise
Lexmark had already invested in a robust digital foundation using Adobe Experience Manager. But while content operations were improving, content findability was stuck. That in addition to the hidden costs of open-source search made it an obstacle to overcome, rather than a strategic enabler.
Their open-source search demanded constant manual intervention. Teams were devoting significant engineering hours just to maintain relevance and coverage — without seeing the payoff in user experience.
“The previous solution was one that took a lot of effort and energy from the team and didn’t deliver a great result,” Dattilo said. “So we knew we could do better.”
Getting Buy-In: Aligning Customer Experience Around a Common Priority
Once a search project is approved, where do you start? Who owns the company’s digital customer experience? Search shouldn’t be deployed in a silo.
One of the most powerful drivers behind Lexmark’s success was cross-functional alignment. Rather than owning the project in a marketing silo, Dattilo’s team pulled in support, service, and IT stakeholders to co-develop a vision.
After all, one common contributor to a negative search experience is siloed content — information that’s stored across separate repositories and owned and managed by different departments or teams. Our most recent Customer Experience Relevance Report found that 84% of site visitors felt they had to work hard to find information or get help from a company, with one of the biggest reasons being inconsistent communication between departments. Fifty-three percent said they just wanted to easily search for and find information on their own!
To create a truly dynamic customer experience on the Lexmark websites, Dattilo’s team would need buy-in from across the company.
“We did not try to take this on by ourselves as a marketing organization,” he said. “We spoke with other organizations that had similar types of issues, such as our services and support organizations, and really came up with a unified strategy that we all needed to increase or create a better search experience for our portion of the business.”
Relevant reading: Reimagine Search With Generative Answering in Your Enterprise Tech Strategy
This collaboration was part of a broader initiative that included consolidating systems and moving from on-prem to cloud. That shift freed the budget to invest in a smarter search engine.
“To some degree, it’s not a hard business case to make to the executive team in that search is one of the main access points for our customers…,” Dattilo said. “So it’s a huge entry point, and optimizing that entry point in any step of the journey is going to create huge benefits for us, potentially increasing sales in the front end and certainly reducing those service costs and such on the back end.”
From Curiosity to Criteria: Defining the Search Box of the Future
Dattilo’s team began the evaluation journey with a critical realization: they didn’t yet know what modern search could do. Lexmark’s previous search tool was potentially over a decade old — meaning enterprise search experiences had evolved in leaps and bounds. And since search is the crux of a digital experience — 43% of site visitors who visit a website with a specific goal in mind go straight for the search box — that means it needs to be intuitive and deliver search results that contribute to customer satisfaction.
“We certainly had our own internal requirements… One of the things that we were lacking though was just knowledge of what modern search capabilities were.”
They started with exploratory demos and early conversations. Coveo was included in this process, after connecting at Adobe Summit 2024. From there, working with other departmental stakeholders, the team built a formal RFP that included both technical must-haves and aspirational functionality.
In the end, Lexmark needed a search platform that could:
- Index content from multiple business source repositories
- Respect content permissions and access levels
- Support multiple channels and device types
- Reduce the need for manual tuning
- Scale into generative experiences
“Our main use case was we wanted a better experience with less effort,” said Dattilo. “That was the bar that we needed to cross.”
Generative Enterprise Search That’s Grounded — Not Guessing
AI has been an executive buzzword for years, but finding a business need that applied AI satisfies is harder than it looks. Generative AI has solved that puzzle, presenting a practical way to meet a real business requirement — making it easier for customers to find answers they need, without making them dig through multiple documents.
“For us, generative AI did become a key requirement,” Dattilo said during the interview. “The reality is that a lot of questions aren’t answered in one specific document. It may be answered with a part of that brochure and part of this guide and part of that webpage over here.
“So being able to summarize different content within those sources to generate a response that uses those was huge.”
And our research indicates that customers want this: our 2025 Relevance Report found that 72% expected their online experiences to evolve with generative AI.
Not only was Lexmark looking for a vendor that could fulfill all their search requirements, the company also wanted a platform that could scale into generative applications. Robust enterprise search is the foundation for successful generative AI implementations, not least because it can help mitigate AI hallucinations. Search extends an AI model’s ability to connect with different data sources — crucial when you need your AI to answer questions about your business and product. And a search platform that implements enterprise-grade Retrieval Augmented Generation, or RAG, ensures that the AI model only uses the most relevant, up-to-date content to answer a visitor query. This is what Coveo’s Relevance Generative Answering provides.
What stood out about Coveo even more was the ability to provide real-world business case studies — proven, live customer implementations that executives could test and trust.
Relevant Reading: Coveo Customer Success Stories
The Decision: Scorecards and Clear Front-Runners
When it came time to make a final decision about a search engine provider, Lexmark turned to a tried-and-true method: a scorecard.
“When we run an RFP, we create a scorecard… And, this particular case was pretty easy because the scorecards all aligned that the Coveo platform was really a solution that met our business needs. It was a good value. You had tangible industry users using the solution.”
And post-sale confidence is just as important. Lexmark is still in the early days of implementation, starting with an employee use case — and everything is going smoothly.
“So far everything’s living up to the hype… that’s the other thing: when you get on the other side after your selection, you also want the implementation to go well. And that’s been going well as well.”
Early Wins: Better Search for Internal Sales Enablement Portal
While Lexmark’s public site is still in progress, the internal deployment has already seen strong early results. It began with a sales enablement portal, indexing Adobe Experience Manager assets and associated metadata. The result? Lexmark’s search experience now delivers content to internal teams based on the intent behind a search — not specific keywords.
“We’ve gotten lots of positive feedback on the modern search experience we have with Coveo,” said Dattilo. “We’re looking forward to getting this to our other properties and getting similar results.”
Now the team is preparing to roll out Coveo-powered search across other key properties, including public-facing sites.
Relevant viewing: Turn Content into Answers with GenAI for AEM Sites
Advice from the Trenches: Don’t Wait
Dattilo wrapped up our discussion with clear-eyed advice for other enterprises tackling the same challenges:
- Calculate your true cost. Don’t just look at license fees. Factor in developer time, case volume, and content underperformance.
- Do your research. Learn what modern search platforms can do; you might be surprised by how affordable powerful functionality has become. A great way to get started is with our Enterprise Search Buyer’s Guide.
- Don’t isolate search. Bring your service, support, and digital experience teams to the table. Everyone benefits from better search.
- Think future-proof. If generative answering is on your radar, choose a platform that can grow with you.
Lexmark’s story isn’t just about solving for enterprise search — it’s about taking a friction point and turning it into a long-term strategic advantage.
If your teams are stuck managing outdated tools, struggling with disconnected content, or bracing for GenAI without a plan, take a page from Lexmark’s playbook: center the customer, prioritize what matters, and don’t settle for good enough.
You can do better. And your customers are already expecting it.
Check out the full webinar for the complete discussion:
Dig Deeper
If you’re interested in some of the case studies Dattilo mentioned above, we’ve got a free ebook on 10 Best Practices for Improving Your Site Search Experience. These best practices draw on real-world use cases, including Xero, Informatica, and Formica.