KANA Software has launched KANA Enterprise -- touted as the first unified and omni-channel customer service platform to fully meet customer demands. The omni-channel approach connects cross, agile, and intentional channeling so businesses can ensure a customer’s brand experience is positive, consistent, and cost-effective across all touch points.
James Norwood, Chief Marketing Officer for KANA Software, told Loyalty 360 that using KANA Enterprise can be “transformational” for any company.
“What we found was that customers of some of the world’s largest brands and retailers were finding gaps between organizations as they move between channels,” Norwood said. “Customers expect a more personalized history of their value, so these gaps made it easy for them to switch their allegiances.”
When consumers move from one company to another, there is no deep connection or loyalty, Norwood said.
“KANA figured the only way to integrate all of this customer information was to create a single platform that would hold a holistic view of the consumer,” Norwood said. “And if we could capture context, we could provide agents with information as needed that’s relevant to the transaction at hand. That’s what drove us.”
Customer expectations have risen dramatically, prompting a call to end silo-based organizations that provide inconsistent service. KANA Enterprise uses both agent-based and customer self-service scenarios mixed with technology and capabilities that allow seamless customer service across the contact center, web, mobile, and social spheres.
Deep Contextual Awareness
Beyond omni-channel engagement, KANA Enterprise provides unique capabilities to manage knowledge, data, processes and tasks in context with every interaction -- as they unfold. With KANA Enterprise, organizations can now engage with customers accurately, consistently, and completely across all touch points; continually monitor customer service activities; and re-model (or optimize) those processes as needed to ensure next best action/offer decisions are leveraged to deliver the right service experiences.
Cost-Effective Customer Centricity
KANA Enterprise reduces agent effort by delivering intent-driven processes that are context aware for each customer's journey and every interaction channel. KANA Enterprise also reduces customer effort by easily joining escalation from mobile and web self-service interactions with assisted service scenarios containing full context and history -- removing repetition and ultimately reducing the total cost to serve.
KANA Enterprise -- Beyond Social Listening with Collaboration and Response
KANA Enterprise Social Experience embeds social media directly into the agent desktop with full listen and respond capabilities, social community support including crowd-sourced knowledge curation, and agent collaboration via activity streams -- harnessing social insights to improve interactions.
KANA Enterprise -- Leading the Way with Mobile Service that Works
KANA Enterprise Mobile Experience ensures customers and employees have the same access to the service channels they depend on such as chat, email, social, and search -- but now 24/7 via their smart devices while on the go.
Salmat, which is Australia's largest and most experienced provider of outsourced contact center solutions for many of Australia and New Zealand's most trusted brands, is among early adopters deploying KANA Enterprise as a key component of its integrated multichannel contact center services offering.
Additional early adopters include a global money transfer agent deploying KANA Enterprise as its next-generation contact center for multilingual customer interactions via phone, web, and social channels; a European commercial airline unifying traditional and digital customer support channels with integrated social media insights; and a global satellite navigation systems provider accelerating issue resolution with context-driven knowledge sharing.
Norwood said KANA Enterprise builds upon the acquisitions it has made (Ciboodle, Trinicom, Overtone and Lagan). The product launch introduces product convergence delivering a wide range of capabilities that includes dynamic case management; web self-service; proactive and mobile chat; co-browsing; social listening, proactive analytics and community engagement; email, and advanced knowledge management.
The Agent Experience features a business process-based and goal-oriented dynamic case management backbone, with a modern user interface that adapts in real time to the context of the interaction at hand – helping agents better resolve issues during the first call.
“Now we can go out to our customers and have the ability to provide an end-to-end omnichannel solution that offers a better customer experience,” Norwood said. “And it seems to be resonating very well.”
The single source of knowledge across all channels, Norwood said, is critical.
“We had a clear blueprint of where we wanted to go,” Norwood said. “Historically, we’ve been strong in digital channels. This can be rendered on any smart device, tablet, or phone. There’s definitely a need for it. Both large and small businesses realize they can’t work with a siloed approach. Loyalty of customers is nothing we can take for granted.”