KANA Introduces New Era of Customer Service with KANA 10

06/30/2009

KANA Software, Inc. (OTCBB: KANA.OB) today announced availability of KANA 10, the industry’s first service experience management (SEM) platform for managing the entire customer service experience. This new solution, which gives major corporations and institutions the control needed to help ensure their customers receive exceptional service, has been selected by online travel service provider priceline.com.

ebizQ received the following:

Developed in conjunction with IBM and KANA customers, KANA 10 is a Web services-based solution that fuses the IBM service-oriented architecture (SOA) portfolio with KANA’s decade of experience in knowledge management and messaging with new ‘experience flow’ functionality, all in a Web 2.0 platform.

KANA 10 brings a new era of flexibility and control to customer service. It can replace traditional approaches by enabling companies to rapidly model and deploy their customers’ entire service experiences. KANA 10 also transcends traditional solutions in which critical customer information resides in separate applications or silos that are difficult to integrate, making it hard for businesses to adjust quickly to changing business conditions.

With KANA 10’s Web services architecture, customers’ existing technology and resources are linked into a single application, providing a seamless experience that can be managed by executives and easily accessed by customer service agents (CSRs). All KANA 10 users, whether a business analyst or CSR, will have a unified view of all pertinent customer information. Business leaders can quickly and effectively design, deploy, and modify customer service processes, or ‘experience flows,’ allowing for real-time process optimization that helps increase revenue, reduce risk, and ensure consistent service.

KANA CEO Michael Fields elaborated, “Working closely with companies like priceline.com has shown us that companies today need dynamic new technology platforms that let service executives control business processes as needed and provide CSRs streamlined ways to more rapidly provide customers the information they want. That’s precisely what KANA 10 is designed to do.”

A longstanding KANA customer, priceline.com is a good example of the customer service evolution taking place at progressive enterprises.

“Priceline.com wanted a solution that increased our agility in accommodating varying business conditions and changes in products to ensure our customers have the ideal service experience,” said priceline.com’s Chief Technology Officer, Ron Rose. “KANA 10, with its experience flow capability, provided us with the ability to accomplish that.”

Balancing KPIs

Balancing business objectives is critical today, and with KANA 10, executives can actively monitor key performance indicators (KPIs), such as cost, revenue, loyalty, and compliance. They can adjust agent workflows to balance these KPIs in real time. These adjustments translate almost immediately on CSRs’ computer screens, which guide them through scripted processes that retain the full context of the customer’s issue, question, or needs, all in a single window. Agents no longer have to onerously ALT+TAB through disparate systems to find the information they need most. Ultimately, KANA 10 provides businesses with the ability to improve first-time fix rates, decrease call volume, and increase customer satisfaction, retention, and ROI.

Forrester Research stated in its April 2009 report titled, “The State Of Customer Experience, 2009,” that “With more access to information, more sensitivity to price, and less sensitivity to advertising, customers are getting harder to win and keep. Organizations try to woo these empowered consumers with mediocre customer experiences — but it won’t work. Firms need to dramatically raise the bar on the customer experience they provide.” To this end, in October 2008 research titled “The Forrester Wave™: Customer Service Software Solutions, Q4 2008,” Forrester also reported that the next generation of customer service applications will integrate three core capabilities — providing multichannel interactions, automating multiple business processes, and accessing multiple customer databases and data sources.

Proven IBM SOA Technology

The KANA 10 solution is built on IBM’s market-leading SOA and Information Management foundation. It also has been validated and certified on a number of IBM Industry Frameworks, including those tailored for the retail, healthcare, telecom, and government sectors. The IBM Framework strategy provides an approach that provides KANA 10 customers access to industry specific experience from IBM, helping to speed the rollout of proven, highly customizable solutions.

“KANA 10 exemplifies how a Web services-based solution can radically benefit businesses today,” said Beth Smith, Vice President of Business Development for IBM WebSphere. “Our partnership with KANA has resulted in a solution that fits ideally into IBM’s ‘smarter planet’ initiative. KANA 10 lets customers integrate disparate customer service systems, knowledge, process, and information, and effectively leverage them across all service channels. This is an excellent example of leveraging Web services in a service-oriented environment. Leveraging IBM's WebSphere Process Server, KANA’s solution provides a reliable platform for providing business agility for human workflow, rapid process changes, and efficient use of resources.”

KANA 10’s key features include:

• Adaptive Desktop – This context-aware desktop adapts to each CSR or customer, providing unified access to the right process, data, and knowledge at the right time during each service interaction, delivering interactive experiences that lead CSRs and customers to fast resolutions.



• Experience Modeling – The Service Experience Modeler combines workflow creation, screen building, business logic construction, and the ability to integrate information from enterprise and knowledge systems. No coding or web development is needed to link a process to knowledge and back-end data, allowing business leaders to quickly make changes without IT support.



• KPI Optimization – The Service Experience Optimizer monitors in real time the objectives set for cost, customer satisfaction, compliance, and revenue, so business leaders can adjust policy, process, and other resources to ensure balance among key metrics.



• Knowledge Empowered Process – The Service Experience Orchestrator delivers the right knowledge and process at each step of a customer interaction, dynamically modifying the experience for unexpected responses and changing customer and business requirements.

KANA 10 is available immediately from KANA and IBM.

Home
Webinars
Blogs
ebizQ Forum
All Topics
Subscriptions
White Papers
Analyst Corner
Follow us on Twitter
Fan us on Facebook

Explore Our Topics

BPM Strategy
BPM Solutions
Event Processing Strategy
Content-Centric & Collaborative BPM
Process-Centric BPM

About Us
Editorial Submissions
Feedback
FAQ
Advertise With Us
Site Map
Privacy Policy
Unsubscribe