Kana is levelling the playing field for midmarket businesses with an updated version of Kana Express for customers who want to have the same access to cloud-based customer services solutions as their larger brethren but at a lower cost of entry and that’s scaled to fit their size at a flexible pricing level.
“There are some fantastic high-end products out there that are very feature rich but they take months and months to deploy,” says James Norwood, CMO, Kana. “At the other end you have some very simple products that don’t cost much but they don’t really scale very well for a rapidly growing midsized business. We found that there is an underserved sector of the market, there was nothing in the middle for businesses that need to perform some sort of differentiated services and need to do it very cost effectively.”
Kana Express provides omnichannel customer services such as phone, email, live and automated chat, social and Web self-service channels. Companies in the midmarket may not initially think that they need such solutions and still have a mindset of simple customer service rather than omnichannel, but Kana Express includes these solutions as part of the package.
“Since we sell this as part of we can get [companies] running across all channels very quickly and cheaply,” says Norwood. “There’s a little bit of [customer] education that goes on here.”
Kana Express features include a new user interface (UI) that is aimed at helping agents resolve issues more quickly at the first contact, reduce average handle times, and increase quality scores. The UI can be seen on Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Safari browsers, and offers help and next-best options automatically and in context so that agents can make fewer mouse clicks and save time while responding to customers.
The solution also offers advanced analytics that provides insight into performance reporting, trends and forecasting. By using analytics and the reporting and analytics framework, the new release offers more personalization, graphical visualization and expanded reporting options, Norwood said.
“Midsized businesses have the same needs as the enterprise they just don’t have the budget or the people," says Norwood. "They still need very strong comprehensive capabilities but they need to be up running fast and at low cost,. They are saying “give us strong customer service that will differentiate us and make sure that we don’t lose customers.” It sounds cliché to say we’re doing more for less but what the midmarket wants is a lot of flexibility for less money and quicker time to value so everything that we’ve done in this release is to give them some sophistication that they can put into place quickly.”