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There are few customer services experiences that are more maddening than that when a customer service rep puts a call on hold and goes searching for a solution to a problem, only to return to the phone with an inadequate answer we probably could have found online ourselves.

Customer service experience management firm KANA wants to help companies avoid such daily customer disasters.

The KANA knowledge management solution revolves around an integrated knowledgebase that pulls all relevant data, including third-party data, and helps serve the appropriate knowledge based on analytics that look at inquiry context and similar queries in the past. This leads to more intelligent knowledge sharing, cutting down on underwhelming customer service interactions.

The service experience management platform from KANA integrates a variety of information channels when helping provide appropriate inquiry solutions, KANA explained. It integrates information from enterprise systems and enterprise business intelligence. It grabs enterprise-supported unified messaging and social network data channels, including e-mail, phone, chat, SMS, blogs, forums and social media. It takes information gleaned from KANA’s knowledge services, messaging services and case services. It also collects data from past inquiries.

“Knowledge works when relevant information is easily accessible by agents from their desktop or by customers via web self-service,” KANA notes on its website. “KANA’s Knowledge Management technology achieves this first through an integrated knowledge base that spans any and all desired data resources. Then, it provides context-driven search processes that deliver on-point information and accurate answers.”

The results have been outstanding for companies such as Xerox and Priceline.com, and for public organizations such as the City of San Francisco.

“KANA has really made our data work hard for us. Intelligent, automated email response and an extensive self-service function has freed up customer service reps for high-level requests,” said Priceline.com CIO Ron Rose. “The task of updating knowledge banks as we develop and expand our service offerings has gone to product management, lifting a heavy burden off IT. We're much more efficient now.”

With Priceline.com, the challenge was handling a rapidly expanding inquiry volume consistently and cost-effectively as the business grew. Its homegrown contact center had little in the way of self-service and no case management capabilities, according to KANA, which made it hard to quantify call drivers and learn from experiential data.

The KANA solution for Priceline.com consisted of providing a link between agents and internal systems such as reservation and billing applications, creating a self-service solution for customers to get easy access to up-to-the-minute travel information that previous accounted for a high volume of customer service inquiries, and better opening the data so managers can leverage case information to improve business processes and create additional efficiencies.

“KANA was deployed in stages and we saw results after each roll-out,” Rose noted. “The investment has already paid for itself many times over.”

With its thoughtful approach that blends technology and analysis, KANA is improving the world’s customer service one customer inquiry at a time.