Services for Organizations

Using our research, best practices and expertise, we help you understand how to optimize your business processes using applications, information and technology. We provide advisory, education, and assessment services to rapidly identify and prioritize areas for improvement and perform vendor selection

Consulting & Strategy Sessions

Ventana On Demand

    Services for Investment Firms

    We provide guidance using our market research and expertise to significantly improve your marketing, sales and product efforts. We offer a portfolio of advisory, research, thought leadership and digital education services to help optimize market strategy, planning and execution.

    Consulting & Strategy Sessions

    Ventana On Demand

      Services for Technology Vendors

      We provide guidance using our market research and expertise to significantly improve your marketing, sales and product efforts. We offer a portfolio of advisory, research, thought leadership and digital education services to help optimize market strategy, planning and execution.

      Analyst Relations

      Demand Generation

      Product Marketing

      Market Coverage

      Request a Briefing


        ISG Software Research Analyst Perspectives

        << Back to Blog Index

        KANA’s SEM Resembles CEM



        I’m no great fan of three-letter acronyms, so I wondered what KANA Software means by positioning itself as the leader in service experience management (SEM), which is a term I had not heard. I have thought of KANA as a CRM vendor, but through a program of internal development and two acquisitions, it has transformed itself into something quite different. The acquisition of Lagan in 2010 added additional CRM functionality, enterprise case management and a track record of providing solutions to public-sector authorities. In April of this year Kana announced the acquisition of Overtone, which added text analytics capabilities, with a particular focus on analyzing content extracted from social media. 

        So how does this all add up to SEM, and what is SEM actually? A look at KANA’s website site suggests it is the combination of three products: an agent desktop, Web self-service and knowledge management. From my perspective, this is three-quarters of what our firm calls customer experience management (CEM). Ventana Research defines CEM as the practice of managing the effectiveness of customer interactions, and it embraces four main technologies: a smart agent desktop, smart self-service applications, customer feedback management and social media management.  

        Whether this is CEM or SEM is not really the issue; what is important is the business processes and activities the products support. CEM includes understanding how customer interactions were handled in the past, how they are being handled at the present time, what the outcomes were of those interactions (what the customers experienced and how they reacted) and how the customer experience can be improved, and then delivering those improvements through knowledge-driven technologies and knowledge-enabled people. 

        If you look behind the covers of the three KANA products, this is indeed what they support. Overall there are capabilities to design the customer experience processes, deliver customer experiences at all touch points, analyze customer feedback to gauge customer reactions and link this back into improving the design of interaction processes. KANA has a highly graphical product that supports the design of interaction-handling processes using point-and-click capabilities to select standardized or custom-designed activities and build them into process maps. There are prebuilt tools to integrate with a variety of applications, and they include the ability to build customer-specific interfaces. A knowledge management tool supports the production of a knowledge base that can deliver information to agents or the website in ways that enhance the customer experience. A case management tool records customer issues and tracks progress through the resolution process. Text analytics can analyze customer feedback either in the form of text (such as surveys, emails or letters) or from social media. And there are capabilities to analyze how the interaction-handling processes are performing and how future experiences can be improved. Kana is working on delivering many of these capabilities, reports and dashboards to intelligent mobile devices so it can keep up with the increasing demand for information on the move. 

        No matter what we call the product category, what counts today is the customer experience, whether it occurs through marketing, sales, customer service, the contact center; a phone call, email, chat session, self-service or social media. Get it right and key metrics such as customer satisfaction, first-contact resolution, net provide score and customer experience score will improve, and operational costs will go down. Get it wrong and customers will leave or perhaps say bad things about your company on social media. What is your company doing to improve the customer experience?

        Regards 

        Richard Snow – VP & Research Director

        ISG Software Research

        ISG Software Research is the most authoritative and respected market research and advisory services firm focused on improving business outcomes through optimal use of people, processes, information and technology. Since our beginning, our goal has been to provide insight and expert guidance on mainstream and disruptive technologies. In short, we want to help you become smarter and find the most relevant technology to accelerate your organization's goals.

        JOIN OUR COMMUNITY

        Our Analyst Perspective Policy

        • Ventana Research’s Analyst Perspectives are fact-based analysis and guidance on business, industry and technology vendor trends. Each Analyst Perspective presents the view of the analyst who is an established subject matter expert on new developments, business and technology trends, findings from our research, or best practice insights.

          Each is prepared and reviewed in accordance with Ventana Research’s strict standards for accuracy and objectivity and reviewed to ensure it delivers reliable and actionable insights. It is reviewed and edited by research management and is approved by the Chief Research Officer; no individual or organization outside of Ventana Research reviews any Analyst Perspective before it is published. If you have any issue with an Analyst Perspective, please email them to ChiefResearchOfficer@ventanaresearch.com

        View Policy

        Subscribe to Email Updates

        Posts by Month

        see all

        Posts by Topic

        see all


        Analyst Perspectives Archive

        See All