Over the past three years or so Kana has been reorienting itself away from its rather unsuccessful positioning as a full suite CRM provider, and for the past 12 months has been concentrating on the concept of service resolution management, defined as solutions to enable companies to solve customer service queries across multiple channels.
Its aim is to provide call center agents with a single streamlined system to enable the resolution of customer queries rather than the manual processes, separate tools and systems that agents typically have to refer to today.
Current technology can track, manage and routes cases and knows a customers’ history, but they are tools and point products. Agents needs to know how and when to use the tools, log into legacy systems and refer to paper-based manuals. SRM captures and automates the resolution process to improve efficiency, said Brian Kelly, executive VP of marketing and product strategy. Its aim is to increase customer satisfaction by providing quality, high-speed resolution, and reducing the cost of service while increasing revenue.
Resolution 8.0 combines knowledge management, business process management, rules technology, and self-learning algorithms. At the heart of the product is the Resolution Workflow engine, which uses these capabilities to take information about the problem from multiple types of interaction channels such as telephone, email and web sites, as well as access to its own workflow and processes, and external information sources to provide the right resolution, then guiding the agent through the whole process, including making additional offers – or not – where appropriate. Resolution can be integrated with Kana and third-party applications and can be used for informational and transactional interactions.
Think of it as the next wave of CRM, said Kelly. Case management has been nailed so it is time to move on to resolution management.
The first Workflow engine will be generic but Kana plans to introduce vertical market versions, such as one tuned for the financial services industry. The December release will be designed for use in call centers but a self-service version is scheduled for release in early 2005.
Kelly said that although many vendors cater for parts of the resolution process, few cover the entire process and can provide a large-scale solution for several hundreds of agents. Its closest competition comes from Primus, RightNow Technologies, and Kanisa.
