KANA makes multichannel customer service software solutions. The KANA Suite, which integrates phone, e-mail, Web, chat and collaboration channels with knowledge management capabilities in a unified application, recently received a Product of the Year Award from Customer Inter@ction Solutions magazine.  

 

We contacted Charlie Isaacs, KANA's chief customer officer, to get his insight on industry trends, where KANA is in their flow, and how best to use KANA’s solutions.

 

The economic downturn has forced everyone to do more with less.  Companies are tired of spending millions of dollars on CRM applications without getting immediate, tangible results.  So they're examining their core service processes and applications, looking for creative ways to increase productivity and lower costs without compromising customer satisfaction. 

 

Customer service organizations are dealing with never-ending change in all directions.  The pace of new product introductions, promotions, new pricing, new policies and rules has accelerated to the point that it's nearly impossible for service managers to keep up. 

 

Customers themselves are changing: rising expectations, new patterns of mobility, a new generation with a new culture.  And, even the means by which customers request service is changing: new channels such as e-mail, chat, instant messaging, and SMS are increasing in importance.   And the consequences of customer service failures are much higher today.  Thanks to the new Internet and mobile technologies, such as Twitter and blogs, companies are vulnerable to negative publicity if the don't have their end-to-end service experience under control.  When customer service breaks down, the repercussions are visible to a much wider audience. 

 

With all of these changes there is also struggle to balance cost and customer satisfaction.  The gap between our customer’s expectations and their capacity to deliver service widens in direct proportion to the pace of change and the capacity to respond.

 

 

KANA is developing a next-generation customer service solution with IBM (News - Alert), called Service Experience Management.  SEM begins with the notion that if you can imagine the customer service process you want, you ought to be able to make it real without reliance on web designers, IT folks, and code customizations.  SEM ends the technology barriers between our customers and their vision for great service.

 

SEM also delivers the capacity to use information, skills and services from across the entire enterprise landscape.  SEM is built on top of a SOA (service-oriented architecture) framework and SOA orchestration so all of our customer’s assets can be building blocks to provide best possible customer experience at the lowest cost to the organization. 

 

 

KANA's software is used by many of the world's largest and best-know brands. These are companies that have a large customer base, and handle millions or even billions of customer service interactions.  Companies use our software in their call center or customer service organization have reduced costs dramatically and increased customer satisfaction an average of 20 percent.

 

 

Absolutely: the ability to adapt technology to each company's unique business process is critical to competitive differentiation.  Applications that force service managers to shoe-horn their processes into the vendor's model compromise business agility and differentiation.  At KANA, agility and flexibility are core design principles. 

 

 

This shift is already happening: we have customers who are deploying their agents all over the world, and customers who have shifted significant portions of their call center staffing to a home-based agent model. As bandwidth improves to the far reaches of the globe, more and more of our customers are recognizing that their agents don’t have to be sitting at headquarters or even a subsidiary. KANA’s new and existing technology accommodates this new decentralized model by providing applications that can accommodate different business rules, duty hours, workflows, and tracking. Also, KANA’s applications have been written from the ground up to minimize network bandwidth and utilization; this enables distributed agents running over slower connections to utilize the entire suite of KANA products.

 

 

 

Feedback is key to identifying opportunities for change. Provide the ability to feedback not only comments but KPI’s into the model

 

 

Graphically model the business within KANA’s tools. Encourage “the business users” to own the model. Generate KPI’s to measure and get them set up in KANA’s analytics

 

 

Leverage integration partners for their depth and breadth of expertise. Make use of KANA’s extensive Best Practices library and repository