KANA Announces Results Of Recent Industry Survey Conducted At SSPA Conference
Menlo Park, Calif. – March 31, 2005 � KANA Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: KANAE), a leading provider of Service Resolution Management (SRM) solutions, today announced findings from a recent customer service survey conducted at the April SSPA Conference in San Diego, CA. The survey revealed that while most companies have traditional CRM case tracking, call routing and email systems in place, they are lacking a complete solution that addresses service resolution, the most critical and costly component of providing customer service. The survey also identifies other key pain points contact center professionals are facing such as having accurate data, complete channel integration and self-service options.
The results of KANA�s survey illustrate the demand in the marketplace for solutions to improve service resolution management on the Web and in the contact center. Almost forty percent of participants cited self-service and call center deflection as their most critical customer service initiative for 2005. At the same time, although eighty percent of respondents currently utilize self-service and email channels, over seventy percent of customer inquiries still come via the telephone.
Service resolution management guides both customers and contact center agents to the information needed to quickly answer questions, resulting in more successful Web self-service sessions and increased first-call resolution rates and reduced call handling times in the contact center. Regardless of the channel, reducing the overall time to resolution significantly improves customer satisfaction and generates additional cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.
In a Gartner report entitled �CRM Predicts 2005: Customer Service and Support, 15 December 2004�, Research Fellows Michael Maoz, Jim Davies and Esteban Kolsky state �The most-important areas of customer service and support investment in 2005 will be pragmatic and focused on revenue growth: best-of-breed applications rather than suites, understanding customer intentions and designing applications accordingly, automated customer self-service, and optimization of the contact center agent to enable fast problem resolution and identification of upsell opportunities.”
“The results of this industry survey prove companies are seeking solutions for service resolution management,� said Brian Kelly, executive vice president of corporate strategy at KANA. �These solutions, such as KANA�s SRM suite, go beyond traditional customer service involving call routing and case tracking to provide an answer to the inquiry in the most efficient and cost-effective manner, by utilizing multiple channels.”
The survey also shows that ninety-three percent of the survey participants responded that accurate customer data is crucial to providing superior service. KANA anticipated this need and provides its KANA Integration Manager built into KANA Resolution. It allows customer service agents to pull from all databases, bringing real-time enterprise information, such as customer history, shipping and billing into a single integrated view. This makes agents more effective and efficient thereby improving customer satisfaction levels.
About KANA
KANA is a leading provider of Service Resolution Management (SRM) solutions that improve customer satisfaction, reduce service costs, and increase revenues. KANA�s award-winning suite of customer service solutions for assisted, self, and proactive service enables companies to resolve customer requests quickly and accurately across multiple channels. Built on the industry�s most advanced web architecture, KANA�s solutions are in use at more than half of the world�s largest 100 companies. For more information visit www.kana.com.