How National Bank of Canada Built a Search Experience Employees Trust

Headquartered in Montreal, Quebec

Financial Services / Banking

nbc.ca

National Bank of Canada is one of the country's major financial institutions and the only major Canadian bank headquartered in Quebec. Across retail banking, commercial banking, private banking, capital markets, operations, and corporate teams, approximately 35,000 employees help millions of clients make decisions that affect their day-to-day lives, businesses, and futures.

For Bajeenthan Baskararasa's Digital Workplace and Knowledge Management team, employee experience is not a back-office concern. It is a critical part of how the Bank serves its clients. If employees cannot quickly find accurate, trusted information, it can slow down client conversations, create inconsistent experiences, and increase the risk of employees relying on information that is outdated, duplicated, or incomplete.

"The easier it is to find information, the easier it is for employees to be proactive, and it's easier for us to serve our clients," Baskararasa said.

That belief shaped how National Bank approached redesigning its employee intranet. Rather than easily finding what they needed, public-facing employees bounced between multiple sources, documents and web pages, and had to do it all quickly to answer real-time customer questions.

The team's mission: bring as much of the simplicity employees expect from consumer search into the workplace as possible, while still respecting the realities of a secure, regulated bank.

As Baskararasa put it, employees needed something closer to "a Google for my workplace world."

Like many established enterprises, National Bank had built up a large body of institutional knowledge over time. Policies, procedures, product information, support content, client-facing resources, and operational guidance all existed, but they were not always easy to find in one place. Employees relied primarily on different repositories for internal knowledge, alongside the corporate website, nbc.ca, for information that could be shared with clients. Each source had its own native search that depended on exact keywords. And each required employees to know where and how to look before they could begin.

The stakes were most important for employees working directly with clients. They need accurate information in the moment, and the information has to be something they can trust, use, and sometimes show to the client directly.

Baskararasa described the challenge: "It was not a natural language search. Unless you knew the words of the documents or the content you were searching, it was a hit or miss."

Experienced employees learned those nuances over time. Newer employees had to struggle through them.

The problem became even more complex when the same search can mean different procedures for different sectors at the Bank.

"A simple query, like opening a bank account, could be a very generic query," said Eleonore Guy, Product Owner for the digital workplace at National Bank. "But depending on where you are, whether you're in commercial banking, retail banking, or another line of business, it can require following a different process."

Search was not personalized to employee role, line of business, or context. That meant employees could use the right keyword and still receive results that were not useful for their actual job.

Over time, employees developed their own way to work around search limitations. For example, some memorized procedure titles. Others saved browser favorites. And when search failed, many turned to experts that support employees by answering procedural questions and more complex tasks.

Those workarounds made sense at an individual level. At enterprise scale, they were not ideal.

Employees needed to know that what they found was the right procedure, the right policy, and the right source of truth — not a stale document, duplicated content, a personal PowerPoint, or an unofficial answer that happened to appear in search.

National Bank needed a better way to control the knowledge experience while making it simpler and more efficient for employees.

Before National Bank could improve search, it first had to look at the foundation supporting it.

The team understood that smarter technology would only be as good as the content it surfaced. If knowledge was outdated, duplicated, inconsistently written, or unclear in ownership, better search could simply make poor information easier to find. For a regulated financial institution, that was not an acceptable outcome.

So National Bank invested in the work behind the search bar: cleaning up the content.

The Knowledge Management team clarified which sources should be considered authoritative, who owned them, and how they would stay accurate over time. That meant answering practical but essential questions: Who is responsible for a procedure? Who updates it after an organizational change? Who should an employee contact if something looks wrong? What makes a page reliable enough to appear in enterprise search?

Rather than go through a one-time cleanup, National Bank built a long-term governance model.

National Bank created clearer content ownership, revision cycles, and writing standards. The team also leaned on internal expertise in UI, UX, and behavioral analysis to understand how employees consume information. A procedure should not be read like a newsletter. A policy should not be structured like a team update. Different types of knowledge needed different standards so both employees and machines could understand them.

That work also connected to a broader mandate for knowledge quality. Content needed to be structured, supported by metadata, and accessible to employees with different needs, including reading, hearing, or visual accessibility requirements.

Once content met those expectations, it could become eligible for enterprise search.

Baskararasa described that final governance step as a threshold for trust: if a team followed the standards, their content could be included in enterprise search because it was reliable, governed, and could be treated as a source of authority.

That work gave National Bank something more sustainable than a better intranet. It created a governed knowledge foundation the organization could continue building on — for search, for AI, and for future digital workplace experiences.

"All the heavy lifting we did for Coveo actually made us better for later," Baskararasa said.

The need for better access to information was clear to client-facing employees. The next step was showing leadership why it mattered for the business.

That meant putting numbers behind a hard-to-measure situation. Baskararasa's team linked the issue to a larger business goal: helping employees find trusted information faster so they could serve clients better.

Led by the employee experience team, the business case was a group effort with IT. Their overarching goal was not to simply deploy a new tool — it was to improve employee proficiency overall.

Baskararasa's team also had an advantage: digital workplace and knowledge management sat together. That meant they could work on employee experience and on the underlying knowledge quality at the same time.

The team conducted employee interviews and observation sessions to understand how people actually searched, where they got stuck, and which workarounds had become part of the job. They also examined reliance on internal call centers as a signal that employees were not always able to self-serve the knowledge they needed.

At the same time, National Bank looked externally to understand the information retrieval landscape, then worked with IT, security, lines of business, and procurement stakeholders to define business and technical requirements before entering the RFI/RFP process.

One principle shaped the evaluation: the experience had to be simple enough to adopt without heavy change management. An effective search experience should be intuitive and require little to no training. The team wanted to create a seamless experience within the tools and platforms employees were already familiar with.

The goal was a search bar simple enough for employees to use immediately, but intelligent enough to handle the complexity of a large, bilingual, regulated enterprise.

National Bank evaluated several vendors and selected Coveo. Coveo stood out because it aligned with National Bank's most important requirements: unified access to knowledge, natural language understanding, personalized relevance, and a search experience that could improve from user behavior over time.

National Bank needed one experience across multiple data sources. Employees should not have to decide whether the answer might be in internal repositories or public-facing content on nbc.ca before beginning their search.

The Bank also needed relevance to adapt by context. Two employees could type the same query and need different results depending on their role, line of business, and task. Relevance could not be generic; it had to reflect the employee's world.

Guy described the requirement this way: the platform had to "deliver relevant results adapted to the user profile and their job and what their search needs are."

The team wanted search to improve over time without constant manual work. National Bank needed a solution that could be configured, governed, and learn from how employees used it.

Language support was another deciding factor. National Bank serves English- and French-speaking employees and clients, with French Canadian especially important to the employee experience.

"We're bilingual," Baskararasa said. "We had to make sure that it really worked on both languages."

Coveo's administrative experience also mattered. The team needed to add data sources, manage personalization, and access analytics without creating unnecessary operational burden. For the people responsible for the digital workplace, usability behind the scenes was just as important as usability for employees.

"The admin console of Coveo was really interesting for us," Guy said, highlighting the ability to configure data sources, add personalization rules, and access analytics in a business user-friendly way.

With Coveo, National Bank saw a path to a more intuitive search experience for employees and a more scalable operating model for the team behind it.

Before signing the contract, National Bank tested Coveo through a proof of concept (POC) on its public website. The goal was to see whether the platform could meet the Bank's business requirements and handle the kind of search experience the team wanted to deliver. By the end of the POC, Coveo delivered more relevant search results than the Bank's current solutions.

Once the contract was signed, implementation began immediately. Coveo Professional Services worked with National Bank to configure the search experience. Internal IT partners ensured the solution met the Bank's development, deployment, and UI standards. Coveo was embedded directly into the intranet, the landing page employees already used to access tools, tasks, and employer information.

That placement was deliberate. Search could not live off to the side. It needed to sit inside the critical path of work, where employees already started their day.

The implementation also had to satisfy the requirements of a highly regulated financial institution. Data residency, operational resilience, deployment standards, knowledge quality, security, cyber, procurement, and regulatory requirements were addressed before and during implementation.

Coveo's enterprise tier also supports 99.999% availability, giving National Bank the reliability expected for mission-critical digital workplace experiences.

Compliance was not an afterthought. It was built into the process from the start. Guy described the implementation as smooth and collaborative.

"The collaboration within our own [National Bank] internal teams and Coveo worked really well," she said. "Coveo was very flexible in adapting to our business requirements."

Six months later, National Bank launched the new Coveo-powered employee search experience.

Baskararasa compared the experience to the consumer tools employees already understand.

"It's not a static tool," he said. "It's a tool that learns from me and it's a tool that's going to be there throughout my journey of whichever role I have within the organization."

There was another sign that the project had landed well: after launch, employees did not flood the team with unexpected requests to change the experience. Guy said the team had validated as much as it could before deployment — from business requirements to POC work — and that preparation paid off.

For National Bank, that is where employee experience and client experience meet.

One year after launch, National Bank is seeing strong signs of success: 84% satisfaction rate, 100% of targeted users accessing the portal at least once, and continued reliance on search even as GenAI tools become more common.

That last outcome was not guaranteed.

National Bank launched its new portal during a period when GenAI was rapidly reshaping expectations for how people find information. The team wondered whether employees would still maintain the reflex to search.

"So far, yes," Guy said. "Just having a search that you can write queries in natural language… this is a really big improvement to their experience across different lines of business."

Embedding Coveo in the intranet helped drive adoption. Because the intranet is the landing page for employees and the entry point to many daily tasks, search became visible, accessible, and habitual. Employees did not have to remember where to go. Search was already there.

Employee feedback illustrates this candidly:

• "The NB Portal has become my go-to tool. I can't do without it."
• "I love this new search engine, mainly for the following reasons: I no longer need to wonder where the information I'm looking for is stored. Its visual appearance feels much more modern than the old intranet. I really like the "People also ask" and "Authoritative Information Sources" sections. Overall, I love this new homepage."
• "The search engine is definitely remarkably effective!"

The experience also felt more familiar. At home, people are used to digital experiences that learn from behavior and improve over time. At work, especially in secure environments, that kind of simplicity is harder to deliver. National Bank's team wanted to get as close as possible without compromising the standards required from a bank.

For other organizations considering intelligent search, National Bank's experience highlights the importance of looking beyond the technology itself. A strong knowledge foundation can help create the conditions for a more effective search experience.

Search platforms can improve relevance, access, and personalization, but their value depends in part on the quality and governance of the information they surface.

"No matter how good the technology you pick is, if it's garbage in, it's garbage out at the end of the day," Guy said. "Having a strong governance over content is the first step to everything, and then adding a good technology and an intelligent search on top of it makes the success of a project."

That is especially true in financial services, where institutions are highly regulated and closely watched. Search must reduce risk, not introduce it. It must help employees find accurate, approved information with confidence.

Baskararasa echoed the same point: "You have to make sure your foundation is strong before trying to say that the technology is going to fix your problem."

For National Bank, success came from pairing both sides of the equation: a strong knowledge management foundation and an intelligent search platform built to learn from employees over time.

Together, they created a streamlined digital workplace, a more trusted employee experience, and a foundation the Bank could build on next — which is exactly what they're doing.