Interview with Kate Leggett - Director of Product Management for Kana Knowledge Based Products

05/25/07

What is Kana currently doing in the marketplace?

We are a ten-year old company, founded in 1996, and the result of eleven mergers and acquisitions. We have spent a lot of time the last couple of years consolidating products, product time lines and roadmaps, as well as vision and strategy. KCS fitted into what we wanted to do and where we wanted to go.

What is the target market that you are looking at?

Our sweet spot is multi-channeled customer service. What we are seeing is a real shift in the way people do customer service. Email has become a well established adopted channel and chat is being more and more utilized. What we are finding is that many industries are fielding growth in eService communication as well as the need to consolidate all their interaction channels with their customer base to be able to provide the same experience to their customer irrespective of the choice of channel that the customer chooses. At the core of our multi-channel customer service solution is our knowledgebase that all our other applications access  - that is our chat application, call center application or our email application.

Is this strategy receiving a good response from customers?

It is. Many of our recent wins have been attributed to our multi-channel capabilities and as well as market timing. Multi-channel customer service has been touted for many years by vendors. But what we are seeing is that our customers are only now needing to provide customer support to their customers in a multi-channel format.

Why did you become KCS verified?

Because we have deeply integrated our product line to be able to offer multi-channel customer service, and at the core of this integration is our knowledgebase. We are finding that many of our customers are expressing an interest to loosen up the control of their knowledgebase and to be able to pass in some of the Web 2.0 principles to the way that knowledge is managed. KCS plays very nicely to a methodology of being able to solicit agent, customer and expert user feedback in order to optimize the content of your knowledgebase.

KANA’s knowledge management solutions can support a very thorough step-by-step workflow process or we can loosen up the control of the way knowledge is created and offer knowledge management via the KCS methodology. We wanted to be able to state that our product supports an established, workflow-driven authoring methodology as well as a KCS methodology of authoring.

Do you see your customer actually knowing what KCS is or are any of them asking for it?

Most of our customers don’t ask for it per se. This is because many of our customers are in the financial, telecommunications and healthcare sector which are heavily regulated.

However, some of our high tech customers are already using a Wiki style authoring format which allows agents to update a knowledgebase. This is in alignment with the KCS model. These customers are asking for a better understanding of KCS principles and how they can be leveraged.

What is your product that was recently verified for KCS?
It is called IQ and it our knowledge management product - Version 9.

How do you envision the future of KCS?

It is a set of best practices and a methodology for being able to gather agents and customer feedback to optimize the content of the knowledge base so that it contains answers to the questions that customers are asking, in the customer’s vernacular. So I see it as a methodology that a corporation buys into for the management of the information within their knowledgebase.

Are you seeing a good return of investment for your customers specifically along the lines of KCS?

Very few of our customers implement KCS per the way it is described in the Consortium for Service Innovation. This is because KANA’s core base of customers are in the financial services industry and health care and communication industries which are heavily regulated. However we do see an interest and adoption with our retail customer base, as well as our high tech customers which have expert user communities.

Do you see any trends for the demand of the KCS verified products? 

Our customers are just beginning to be educated about the KCS methodology. We find that some customers request some of the principles that embody KCS which are not very different from the collaborative authoring methodologies that are the core foundation of the Web 2.0 world.

What areas of the KCS methodology do you see your product as a strong fit?

All of them. We are able to support every single step in the solve and evolve loop and we have reports and analytics that are able to report on KCS metrics.

Would this be reporting items like reuse? 

Yes, as well as knowledge creation, number of duplicates created, number of unique solutions created as well as content that is not used in the knowledge base and content that is not there in the knowledge base. We have a very flexible reporting platform that allows you to easily create any custom reports that are able to answer virtually any question you may ask.

And KCS has two thrusts. The first is that it is a methodology of maintaining the content in your knowledgebase: agents and customers taking collective responsibility for any piece of content that they act interact with - the “flag it or fix it” idea. The second is the ability to report on and understand the agent trends and the usage trends of your knowledgebase.

How configurable is your product?

Our product is very configurable. If you want to have a very work flow driven authoring process our product can support that and if you want to loosen the authoring process completely and have it KCS-like where content is published in draft mode as soon as it is authored, we can do that too. What underpins our product is a very configurable workflow engine that we can set up to any business process that a company would have.

Are there any other additional comments you would like to make about KCS or Kana?

KCS is the way of the future, and I believe the rate of adoption for KCS-like methodologies is coming. We see that that Wikis and blogs are taking off. In the Web 2.0 world, the trend is not to rely on a small subset of the agent population to create content. The trend is to solicit the input of every agent that is fielding questions from customers when they talk to customers.

Additional Resources

Brave New Way of Looking at Knowledge by Kate Leggett http://www.crmadvocate.com/required/kana030807.html

Press release for Kana KCS certification is located at: http://www.kana.com/news.php?pressID=377

KCS is a registered service mark of the Consortium for Service Innovation

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