Advancements Reinforce Added Value from Single Vendor Customer Engagement Optimization Solution

Verint® Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: VRNT) and KANA® Software, A Verint Company announced a major new release of its KANA Enterprise solution, featuring enhancements designed to drive customer engagement center effectiveness, employee collaboration and productivity, and responsiveness to rising customer demands.

KANA Enterprise now offers organizations additional functionality, such as better and faster ways of managing, monitoring and optimizing interactions and contact center resources; dynamic case management that reduces employee effort by displaying information concisely; and employee collaboration through peer-to-peer learning.

The new release, which became generally available last month, is the first KANA Enterprise product introduction to follow the acquisition of KANA Software by Verint earlier this year. KANA Enterprise is part of a comprehensive customer engagement optimization portfolio that leverages the heritage and strengths of both companies. These advancements mark a milestone in the combined enterprise workforce optimization and omnichannel customer service solutions roadmap, bringing even greater value to organizations and reinforcing Verint’s focus on offering a broader customer engagement optimization solution, all from a single provider.

Smarter Engagement Reduces Customer and Employee Effort
Advancing its leadership position in helping customers address the omnichannel customer service imperative, KANA Enterprise features a next-generation interaction and work management engine. Smart Engagement™ helps ensure service requests are routed to the best employee for the task, not simply the next available employee, and helps improve first contact resolution, heighten customer satisfaction and achieve cost effectiveness. Intelligent rules route requests from web self-service, mobile, live chat, co-browse, email, whitemail, social and secure messaging channels. This helps ensure customers obtain service from the best agent for their particular issue, as opposed to the simply the next employee in the queue, and that every interaction is complete, consistent and contextual.

Enhanced Employee Productivity Drives Customer Service Efficiencies
New knowledge management features complement Verint Workforce Optimization strengths to help improve employee productivity by keeping employees and customers—via self-service channels—educated and apprised of the latest information updates. Dynamic case management enhancements streamline customer service interactions to help reduce employee effort by presenting clear paths to expedite complex issue resolution.

Web self-service and secure messaging capabilities help organizations address digital customer engagement challenges to realize greater returns on “digital first” channel shift initiatives, and empower customers to serve themselves 24/7 via any computer or smart device.

The latest release of KANA Enterprise also offers new chat and co-browse (secure screen sharing) capabilities that help organizations support customer online experiences, minimizing the risk of web page abandonment and maximizing the likeliness of completing a sale or upsell opportunities by presenting the information onscreen that agents and customers require.

Employee Collaboration Advancements Foster Empowerment and Learning
Additionally, to help address the growing industry demand for employee collaboration and the addition of social features into the workplace, KANA has introduced Activity Streams to help foster peer-to-peer learning and response accuracy to customer inquiries and issues. Activity Streams enable organizations to bring staff together virtually to address and resolve customer issues, and even tap into resources that are not directly engaged in specific customer interactions. With these features come heightened employee engagement, additional learning and development capabilities, and better responsiveness to customers.

Further, new features in the areas of business configuration and dashboards help increase business agility and visibility, giving organizations robust tools to monitor, manage and uncover actionable insights to fine-tune customer engagement strategies and resource allocations. Other administrative tools help reduce implementation time and up-front costs, as well as overall total cost of ownership.

The High Cost of Poor Customer Experience Revealed
Research from industry analyst firm Forrester Research, Inc. shows that failing to meet customer service expectations can be costly. In its February 2014 research note “Connect the Dots Between Customer Self-Service and Contact Centers,” Forrester states that 75 percent of consumers move to another channel when online customer service fails. Additionally, the firm estimates unnecessary service costs to online retailers due to channel escalation total $22 million on average.

“KANA Enterprise helps companies optimize customer engagement and minimize the negative impact of ‘broken’ customer interactions that arise from gaps in context, processes and staffing,” notes Steven Thurlow, head of worldwide product strategy for KANA. “Now B2B, B2C and government organizations can take a holistic and strategic approach to customer sales and service; be better positioned to gain competitive advantage; build more meaningful customer and employee relationships; and reduce costs while increasing revenue.”

KANA Enterprise is used by organizations around the world—including businesses in the airline, financial services, telecommunications, and insurance, technology and retail industries, among others — to help transform their global customer engagement initiatives. The award-winning solution helps address the complex customer service environment facing large commercial enterprises, providing a platform for integrating disparate systems and supporting continuous business processes for customers and agents across all channels. KANA Enterprise also offers exceptional “point solutions” for specific needs, such as knowledge management, case management and web self-service.