White Papers

Service Experience Management

  • Why Enterprises Need Service Experience Management: Will Your Customers Really Wait for You to Get Service Experience Management Right?
    Companies today cannot compete on product and price alone. To survive and prosper, your service experience a critical element of your company’s success or failure. KANA has developed Service Experience Management or SEM to empower you to take control of the service experience that you offer your customers. SEM is the closed loop process of controlling and adjusting customer interactions while improving company performance. In addition, SEM ensures the ability to provide this ideal service experience in accordance with a balanced set of key performance indicators. This paper explains why companies need a new approach to managing service processes, how SEM transforms the management and control of service processes and how SEM enables evidence-based service management.

  • Service Experience Management: Key Technology Crown Jewels
    Gaining control of the service experience to rapidly adapt to market pressures, increase customer loyalty, reduce service costs, and ensure compliance is the imperative for every customer service executive. This requires a technology solution that enables closer and more successful collaboration between IT and business owners.

    KANA’s Service Experience Management (SEM) solution empowers both IT and service organizations to quickly design and adapt service experiences to meet the needs of both the customer and the business. This paper describes the way that a service organization can take control of the service experience without IT involvement. It outlines KANA’s technology crown jewel of modeling the service experience, orchestrating it across technology, people and processes, measuring its effectiveness, and using the results of the measurements for continual optimization.

  • Reaping the Benefits of SOA in Customer Service Organizations
    In the past few years, service-oriented architecture (SOA) has emerged as a business-centric IT architectural approach that supports integrating a business through linked and repeatable business services. KANA and IBM have joined forces to harness the benefits of SOA in a solution that is specifically designed to meet the needs of customer service organizations. KANA 10 embeds the market-leading technology of IBM SOA Foundation into a transformational solution for rapidly developing and delivering service interactions which are perfect expressions of a company’s business goals for each customer touch point. This paper will provide you with insight into the value of SOA to your service organization and explains how IBM and KANA have built KANA 10 to help you successfully deliver a consistently outstanding, cost-efficient customer service experience

  • Evidence-Based Service: Building Brand Through Every Customer Touchpoint
    In today’s world, every customer touchpoint, including customer service, must enforce a company’s brand. However, companies have found it difficult to measure the effect of customer service on brand. What is needed is an ability to align the service experience with brand in a way that is appropriate for customers, yet enables the company to effectively manage costs, compliance, and other key performance indicators (KPIs). This requires the ability to measure the effect of each service interaction on brand perception and customer service KPIs. Evidence-based service is a practice which uses experimentation and rigorous measurement, and allows customer service organizations to determine how each customer interaction affects brand. By deliberately changing and testing a service process and then re-measuring their impact, the organization can discover the best possible process to satisfy customers and reinforce brand while meeting company KPI objectives.

  • Seeking a Fix to Customer Service Issues? Don’t Look in the Attic
    By Charlie Issacs. In cleaning out my attic the other day, I got to thinking about customer data integration in the era of the service oriented architecture (SOA). The reason I began thinking of customer data integration is not just because I am in the customer service industry, but because the attic is a great metaphor for the traditional approach to managing customer data.

Knowledge Management

  • KANA KCS Verified Solutions - How KANA Supports and Extends Knowledge-Centered Support
    KCS provides levels of business agility, cost savings and knowledge quality that are essential to dealing with the exploding inquiry volumes, skyrocketing customer expectations and complex technologies that challenge support organizations every day. KANA is a KCS-certified vendor with knowledge management solutions that meet the extensive functionality required to support a KCS-focused support organization. This white paper explains the essential aspects of KCS and demonstrates how KANA solutions comply with KCS principles

  • Six Best Practices in Agent Knowledge Management
    This paper provides a series of best practices to help you achieve outstanding results from your knowledge management implementation in the contact center. It summarizes the lessons KANA and its customers have learned through many years of successful deployments and highlights the six best practices we have found are most crucial to success.

  • Designing the Great Self-Service Experience
    When it comes to getting help and answers, more and more customers want the convenience of Web self-service. Adoption of this always-available channel has shown remarkable growth in the past few years, especially for such activities as researching a product or service before deciding what to buy. How can you avoid failed self-service? In this paper, we will look at best practices to help you deliver self-service that aligns with customer expectations while helping to contain service costs. These best practices are the result of many self-service implementations by KANA customers around the world.

  • The Search is On
    This highly informative white paper delves into the subject of optimizing search engines and knowledge bases specifically for use by customer service agents and customers themselves, via web self-service portals. It explores specific strategies to help your agents and customers find the answers they want faster and easier than ever before.

eService

  • Best Practices to Accelerate the Quality, Consistency and Speed of Email Service
    Email continues to be one of the fastest growing customer service channels, enabling companies to reduce their cost per contact by up to 75-80% compared with phone interactions.1 Recent research has shown that email has become a preferred support channel for many high-value customers. Through KANA’s many years of deploying email response management at major companies worldwide, we have developed a series of best practices that will materially aid your efforts to deliver service that inspires customer satisfaction, confidence and loyalty. In this paper, we discuss the purpose of these best practices and outline practical implementation considerations.

  • Increase Customer Self-Service Success with KANA Web Collaboration
    Effectively blending Web collaboration and self-service requires Web collaboration solutions that make it easy for customers and agents to interact, keep interactions private, and can be cost-effectively deployed and administered in an enterprise service environment. KANA Web collaboration enables enterprises to more effectively reach, serve and retain customers with integrated text chat and Web page co-browsing. These channels can be combined with self-service to offer communication flexibility and convenience that helps to increase customers’ use of and satisfaction with self-service, reduce online abandonment rates and improve sales effectiveness.

  • KANA Secure Messaging Drives Compliance with Privacy Regulations
    As Internet use expands, the importance of protecting sensitive and mission-critical information has rapidly increased. Both consumers and governments are demanding that enterprises effectively protect information sent over electronic channels. The most common form of Internet-based communication—email—presents significant security and privacy challenges. Enterprises need a secure email messaging solution that ensures data privacy, but does not limit the ease of email interactions, disrupt contact center processes or limit message growth. This paper examines how KANA Secure Messaging enables efficient and effective email interactions that maintain the privacy of communications.

  • PCI Data Security Compliance in KANA Applications
    How KANA Applications Help Companies Comply with PCI Data Security Standards. The PCI DSS standard offers companies an effective path to securely process, store, and transmit sensitive data. With the security capabilities built into KANA solutions, companies can materially improve their PCI DSS compliance during customer service communications.

Multi-Channel Customer Service

  • How to Profit from the Shift to Multi-Channel Customer Service
    For multi-channel service to truly meet the needs of the modern customer, it must do more than simply provide many channels. Too often, each new channel is implemented as a silo, resulting in multi-channel service that is disconnected and inconsistent. True multi-channel service delivers an integrated and seamless experience that is completed in as timely, consistent and effective a manner as possible regardless of channel.

  • Guidelines for a Successful Multi-Channel Service Strategy
    A well executed multi-channel service strategy can have a profound – and positive – impact on customer satisfaction and service operational efficiency. But in many cases, these channels operate as silos with little integration between them. This style of multi-channel service can easily frustrate customers because it delivers a service experience that is disconnected and inconsistent. And the cost of poorly executed multi-channel service can be high, both in terms of customer loyalty and operational costs. In this paper, we will outline a series of best practices to help you successfully implement multi-channel service.

  • pdf_icon Companies Find Faster Call Resolution Key to Cost Center Profitability
    By Marchai Bruchey. As companies face a backlash against offshore call centers, or are simply finding it was not the right solution for their particular business, they are bringing service back to the U.S. This doesn’t need to be cost-prohibitive however. Nearly 80 percent of the time and cost of providing customer service is spent on service resolution. The right combination of customer service technology vastly reduces resolution time, even for complex human interactions in the call center. Resolving inquiries faster and providing customers with the satisfactory service also opens the door to up-selling and cross-selling opportunities—transforming call centers into profit centers.

Industry-Specific White Papers

  • Optimize the Insurance Agent’s Performance with KANA Solutions
    Increasing the effectiveness of captive and independent agents is crucial to promoting and sustaining growth in the insurance industry. To increase agent loyalty, enhance their readiness to sell and improve the quality of the customer experience, insurance companies need to offer highly efficient ways to access and leverage knowledge; automate transactional processes; and deliver powerful multi-channel communications that provide customers with interaction availability and choice.

  • How Technology Manufacturers Can Cut the Cost of High Quality Service
    The highly competitive world of technology manufacturing requires manufacturers to find solutions that will help them reduce their operating expenses. Customer service represents a significant cost center as the complexity of products and the rapid pace of product change drive up service and field dispatch costs. Successfully reducing service costs while meeting customer demands for service quality requires the ability to conduct interactions that produce high rates of first call resolution as well as expand self-service effectiveness so that customers can resolve problems on their own.

  • Guidelines for a Successful Multi-Channel Service Strategy In Government
    Government agencies face increasing challenges when it comes to delivering customer service. Inquiries originate from many different sources and cover a broad range of topics varying in their level of complexity and specificity. They also come from a demographically diverse population. And while the volume and complexity of inquiries grows, agencies are expected to deliver high-quality service with lower funding each budget cycle. In this paper, we show how multi-channel service should be correctly implemented so as to provide an accessible, seamless, and consistent experience across all channels.

  • KANA and IBM Online Customer Service Study Summary – US Financial Services Sector
    KANA and IBM joined forces in 2007 to survey the customer service experience of 72 US financial institutions. This was conducted as a “mystery shopper” exercise where researchers attempted to find answers to common questions relevant to each organization’s line of business through online self-service and email. This white paper summarizes the surprising results of this exercise.

  • KANA Online Customer Service Study - US Financial Service Sector
    KANA and IBM joined forces in 2007 to survey 72 US financial institutions for their customer service experience. This white paper describes the detailed findings of our “mystery shopper” exercise of these financial institutions’ email and web self service offering and recommends simple actions to improve the customer service experience.

Market Analyst White Papers

  • 2008 Forrester Wave Report on Customer Service Software
    This in-depth evaluation of ten different vendors ranks KANA as a Leader in Interaction-Centric Customer Service Software. KANA received the highest score for “Strategy” of all ten vendors evaluated, earning a score of 4.84 on a 5-point scale. In assessing Strategy, Forrester compares the strength of the vendors across product strategy, corporate strategy, and time-to-value. Dr Natalie Petouhoff, Senior Analyst at Forrester was quoted as saying, “KANA, a best-of-breed eService provider, continues to evolve its breadth and depth. KANA Software’s strategy is to help the world’s leading brands deliver service experiences that drive customer retention and loyalty and differentiate them from the competition by blending technology, services, and strategy. …KANA has evolved into a robust, capable customer interaction solution provider.”

  • Forrester Recognizes KANA as a Leader in Interaction-Centric Customer Service Management Software
    In addition to being named a leader in Interaction-Centric CSM Software, KANA received the highest score for Current Offering amongst all interaction-centric vendors. According to Forrester VP and Research Director, Chip Gliedman, “KANA, a best-of-breed eService provider for more than a decade, continues to evolve the breadth and depth of its suite." In evaluating KANA and its integrated, multi-channel customer service suite, available through the on-premise and OnDemand deployment models, Forrester also noted KANA’s well-rounded product capabilities, high scalability, and strong integration partners.