Kana Software has unveiled a new version of Kana Enterprise solution, its first product release since it was acquired by Verint Systems in January. The new version's unified omnichannel platform is primarily focused on customer engagement, agent productivity, and agent collaboration via peer-to-peer technology.
One highlight of the release is what Kana calls Smart Engagement, a new customer handling system that has sophisticated business rules to manage Web self-service, routing, mobile, live chat, secure cobrowsing, email, social, and messaging interactions within the contact center.
While customer engagement has many meanings, to Kana the term means making a connection between the consumer and the organization, and engaging the customer with a company's brand and its promises. By doing so, customer interactions climb and are increasingly delivered through personalized multichannel methods.
"We've strengthened our [multichannel] capabilities in this release," says Steven Thurlow, head of worldwide product strategy at Kana. "This [system] can accelerate access to personal content more effectively. Smart Engagement is a big step forward in harmonizing this, and we can use the same system to queue, provide intelligent routing, and use business rules across all those media types."
While voice call distributors are still widely used in contact centers, Thurlow sees digital enablement starting to increase, making the voice channel just one channel among many. The digital and voice worlds can come together, though, in the form of click-to-calling from within an app, he says.
"We've looked at multimodality, and we see that Smart Engagement opens a lot of possibilities to manage interactions and customer journeys," Thurlow says. "It makes things easier to report on and manage."
Smart Engagement features include the following:
- Real-Time Analytics, which monitors and manages work volume across all communication channels within a single view with the actionable dashboard.
- Rules Engine, which ensures incoming work items are delivered to the correct queue and assigned to the most qualified available agent.
- Rules Administration, a business-friendly rules editor that allows administrators to define rules to be applied to incoming or outbound communications.
- Rules API, which enables third-party systems to leverage the Smart Engagement integration rules.
- Advanced Cobrowse, a new cobrowse application that allows customers to have richer Web self-service experiences, reducing abandonment and improving the customer experience.
- Embedded Web Self-Service Widgets, which give users the ability to embed a single session of Kana Enterprise within multiple areas of a Web page and incorporate Kana Enterprise capabilities within an organization's Web site.
Boosting Employee Productivity
The latest version of Kana Enterprise also offers new knowledge management features that complement Verint's workforce optimization solutions and helps employees and customers stay in the loop when information is updated. Multiple monitors help agents better determine the crux of a customer's inquiry or issue.
"We see a real trend these days with contact center agents having multiple screens available to them," Thurlow says. "You can have the knowledge base on one screen and the case and customer information on the other screen, so you can blend multiple screens together to get a common context. We think that