There’s a version of bad search that’s easy to spot — the one that returns nothing, or something completely wrong, and sends the user away frustrated. But there’s another version that’s harder to see, and in some ways more costly. It’s the search that kind of works. The one your team has quietly built a system of workarounds around. The extra headcount hired to manually surface the right products. The catalog processes built to compensate for ranking that can’t keep up. The accordion of 400 clinical trials that nobody could realistically navigate, so nobody really tried.
This kind of friction doesn’t announce itself. It just accumulates — and it looks different depending on where you sit. For a merchandising team, it’s hours of manual fixes. For an industrial buyer, it’s a missed part match on a tight deadline. For a family, it’s a clinical trial they never found. The circumstances couldn’t be more different. The underlying problem is the same.
The 2026 Coveo Relevance Awards Impact winners represent three organizations that saw the full cost of that friction — and built something better. A wholesale furniture brand, an industrial parts distributor, and a pediatric research hospital. Three completely different missions, three completely different problems to solve. But in each case, investing in great search moved something that mattered.
Four Hands: From Firefighting to Forward Motion
For the team at Four Hands, the workaround had a name: manual merchandising. With a large SKU catalog and a complex B2B customer base spanning residential, commercial, and retail segments, their search system simply couldn’t account for the nuances of how customers shopped. So the team compensated — reactively adjusting results, manually surfacing products, and dedicating resources to fixes that should have been handled automatically.
When Four Hands launched Coveo in late March 2025, that dynamic shifted. Search conversion climbed meaningfully, average order value rose, and the share of orders influenced by search grew significantly. Customers were finding the right products faster and purchasing with more confidence. Zero-result searches became a near non-event, and click-through rates reflected an experience that was finally working the way it should.
But the number that might matter most internally is harder to put in a chart. The merchandising team stopped firefighting and started strategizing — freed up to focus on seasonal launches, inventory visibility, and cross-functional initiatives instead of manual fixes. The operational shift is as much a part of the impact as the revenue numbers.
Relevant reading: The Go-To Playbook for Digital Merchandising Success
Hercules Sealing Products: When Your Customers Speak a Different Language
Industrial buyers don’t search like everyone else. They come in with OEM part numbers, partial numbers, competitor cross-references, and decades of industry shorthand — and they expect the site to keep up. For Hercules Sealing Products, serving hydraulic repair shops, distributors, and industrial plants, the gap between how their customers searched and what their legacy system could handle wasn’t just a UX problem. It was friction baked into every transaction.
Coveo normalized part number behavior, introduced AI ranking for high-intent queries, enabled synonym control, and allowed immediate discoverability of newly launched products without catalog dependency. Web revenue grew substantially year over year, with retail performance accelerating at an even faster clip — driven by high-margin transactions that the old system had been leaving on the table.
For Hercules, the transformation goes beyond the metrics. Search is no longer a lookup tool — it’s a revenue engine, and a strategic one at that. Product and engineering teams now prioritize their roadmap around high-search-volume opportunities. New launches reach buyers faster. And in a space not known for digital sophistication, Hercules has built a meaningful competitive edge.
A Children’s Research Hospital: Removing Friction From the Hardest Search of All
When a parent is searching for a clinical trial for their child, they are not browsing. They are looking for something specific, something urgent, and they need to find it quickly. For years, the clinical trials experience at one of the country’s leading pediatric research hospitals made that search harder than it needed to be — hundreds of active trials presented in a single accordion interface, with no meaningful way to filter, compare, or narrow down options. Families and referring physicians did their best to navigate it. Many couldn’t.
As part of a major site overhaul in 2024, the team rebuilt the experience with Coveo — enabling users to sort and filter trials by disease category, treatment type, age, and other key criteria. The results were significant. Visits to the Clinical Trials landing page grew significantly, and users who engaged with the Coveo-powered filtering were far more likely to click through to a trial detail page — moving from exploration to action in a way the old experience rarely enabled.
For a nonprofit pediatric research hospital, the most meaningful outcome was a significant increase in patient referrals year over year — a direct reflection of improved discovery translating into action for families navigating one of the hardest moments of their lives. Better search didn’t just improve a metric. It helped connect more children to care.
Relevant viewing: Reimagining Find Care: How AI is Powering the Modern Healthcare Journey
Hear More at Relevance 360
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