New Study Shows that Successful CRM Implementations Can Achieve a Substantial Return on Investment
MENLO PARK, Calif., March 22, 2004 – KANA® , a leading provider of knowledge-powered customer service applications, today announced two of its customers that were evaluated as part of a larger study, The Financial Impact of CRM, conducted by IDC, a leading provider of global IT research and advice, showed impressive return on investment (ROI). KANA customers TaylorMade-adidas Golf and HVB Direkt participated in the study. Both implementations highlight how companies are leveraging KANA’s applications to reduce costs associated with customer care through service resolution management.
Analysis based on the 33 organizations that participated in IDC’s study shows that successful CRM implementations can yield significant ROI, ranging from 16 percent to 1,000 percent. The study examined the financial impact of CRM applications on the core processes that contribute to an organization’s success and found that CRM’s greatest impact is on organizational efficiency and business process enhancements. IDC conducted interviews with organizations in North America and Europe that have implemented CRM applications to determine success factors, identify motivations and drivers for CRM, and calculate the financial impact of the implementation on the organization.
“At a time when major IT investments are subject to unprecedented levels of scrutiny, the ROI attained by organizations through CRM implementations is notable,” said Mary Wardley, vice president of Customer Relationships Management Applications Research at IDC. “Over and above the numbers, the lessons and best practices highlighted in the study are instructive. Companies evaluating ROI need to look beyond purely technological measures, and achieve the best results when they focus on a pressing business problem.”
KANA’s Service Resolution Management suite includes solutions for Assisted Service, Self Service and Proactive Service, and ensures that customers and agents have transparent access to information and can leverage multi-channel communication solutions to resolve service issues as quickly as possible. This approach can result in benefits to organizations in terms of increased agent efficiency, and an overall reduction in costs in the contact center. Both KANA customers that participated in the study highlight these benefits.
TaylorMade-adidas Golf recognized that customer communication via e-mail was increasing at a rapid rate, yet it had no resources in place to handle the increase. It turned to KANA to manage both inbound and proactive e-mail communication and help the company provide better customer service without increasing costs or employees in the contact center. With KANA Response™ software, one of the world’s leading e-mail management applications, TaylorMade responds to 70 percent of all e-mail requests with automated responses, freeing customer service representatives to focus on other activities and enabling TaylorMade to expand its service offering without expanding its team. In addition, TaylorMade leverages KANA’s proactive service solution to market to its opt-in customer base. This expanded brand awareness has resulted in increased sales.
“The ROI we have achieved with KANA is two-fold,” said Rob McClellan, director, Global eMarketing and Marketing Strategic Planning. “KANA has enabled us to meet increasing e-mail management demands, without increasing costs, while also helping us provide closed-loop proactive service which results in happier customers and increased sales.”
HVB Direkt is using KANA to support its outsourced customer care and IT services solution. By implementing KANA Response, HVB Direkt has lowered the cost of its own internal technology structure and passes on the savings through decreased pricing to its consulting customers. With KANA Response, HVB Direkt has decreased service resolution time by 75 percent, ensuring fewer agents can answer more customer requests, reducing overhead costs in the contact center.
“KANA customers see significant value in our service resolution management solutions, because faster service, over lower-cost channels quickly results in reduced costs in the contact center,” said Brian Kelly, executive vice president of products and marketing at KANA. “We were not surprised by the positive ROI our customers were able to report to IDC and believe the high ROI our customers achieve is a key indicator of the success of our solutions.”
KANA’s knowledge-powered customer service applications address the needs of Global 2000 organizations in key vertical markets, giving businesses a competitive advantage and increasing their ability to service, market to and understand their customers. Companies around the world benefit from KANA’s knowledge-powered approach to managing customer relationships, which combines sophisticated analytics with thin-client Web architecture to deliver extraordinary customer interactions that decrease costs and drive revenue.
About KANA
KANA (NASDAQ: KANA) provides enterprise customer support and communications applications enabling organizations to better service, market to, and understand their customers and partners. Optimized for specific vertical industries, KANA’s iCARE applications are in use at more than half of the world’s largest 100 companies. An award-winning, modular suite of eCRM applications available on J2EE and .Net, KANA iCARE applications enable customers to do business when, where and how they want, improving customer experiences while decreasing costs in contact centers and marketing departments. KANA’s partner-centric business model includes strategic relationships with the largest systems integrators in the world to support and sell KANA iCARE. For more information visit www.kana.com. For
more information, please visit www.kana.com.
