Alida CXM vs. KANA Express, discontinued

If you need a robust back end statistical program, this is not for you. If you are looking for a slick, interactive media survey tool it deserves a strong look.

If your business has more than 50 users, don't use KANA Express. User management and setup is not intuitive, and back-end email management takes a large amount of time. If your business emails more than one recipient and expects replies from more than one recipient, don't use KANA Express. The system is built for one-question-in, one-answer-out. Anything more than that requires extra customization or is impossible, according to their development team. If managing your inbound email either internally or externally is critical to your operations, don't use KANA Express. Downtime is more frequent than is acceptable, and their Netherlands advanced support team's hours make down-time in the western hemisphere a lot longer than it needs to be.

Incentivized

• The ability to cross-tab and filter in dynamic report is pretty flawless.
• Additionally, the various export formats in the report module are each useful in their own way.
• Their client relations is really nice, they are always quick to respond to issues or additional help needed.
• They do a great job on their end of finding panelists when we need additional people for a survey.

• Allows you to manage multiple email queues with different business rules.
• User interface is somewhat intuitive, allowing users to navigate fairly easily.
• Admin controls allow for a considerable variety of customization.

Incentivized

• Some things on Vision Critical allow for customization, but other pieces seem cumbersome. Based soley on the survey piece of this software, I would rate it better than most basic online survey tools (surveyMonkey or Zoomerang), but not as customizable as some of the more advanced solutions (like Qualitrics)
• The tool in Vision Critical that allows you to see survey data and reports is unwieldy and complicated to use.

• KANA Express is NOT set up for business models where email is conversational and involves multiple recipients and responses. If your business model is one-question-in, one-answer-out, then KANA Express will probably work for you.
• Since signing on with them, KANA Express' support team has been severely lacking in expertise and acceptable turnaround times, especially when the platform encounters a system-wide issue to leads to downtime. Our assigned sales contacts jumped ship with the company almost immediately after we went live, which is never a good sign.
• Admin panel and functions are very antiquated and not user-friendly at all. Email management through the admin tool lacks crucial insight that prevents admin users from being able to easily route and manage emails. Our organization had to write our own KANA user guides that KANA Express then took and started using themselves and for other clients.
• The KANA Express platform does not have proper spam or auto-reply management tools. Admin users must manually turn off the KANA Express auto-response emails in order to prevent email loops with other parties' auto-responses.
• Analytics options are lacking. Admin users must run at least three separate reports in order to gather appropriate insight as to user activities and metrics.
• Email queue/user set up is not intuitive. If adding a new queue or user, all users must be manually adjusted to include that new queue. There is no mass-edit tool for KANA Express users.

Incentivized

There are better options out there. The only motivating factor to use this product is the lower cost and the value received from using it.

I think there is a ton of room to improve, in things as simple as aesthetics and other areas of logical flow when it comes to creating and then launching a survey, as well as providing descriptors for what each field is referencing. For instance, there are like 5 date fields to be filled out, but no button near them that says "this date will determine _________" and I am not about to go back into the training module, which was confusing enough to FIND, let alone work through to find just ONE answer.

Absolutely fantastic support team. Willing to help you online through vast collection of how-to guides and resources, online via chatbox, or over the phone. Even though we were in different time zones, they were always available. Very helpful and knowledgeable

As described earlier in the review, I believe Vision Critical provides a fantastic survey tool. However, I think that some other tools are just as good for simply programming and deploying surveys. The thing that makes Vision Critical stand above the rest is the opportunity it provides for you to easily engage with the same customers on an ongoing basis and tie their responses together over time. I love that we can manage our insight community's home page, emails to panelists, surveys, reports, and much more all from the same tool.

• Particularly with the panel we have been able to save costs on purchasing sample
• With the panel we can quickly field questions for short notice requests

• KANA Express was originally presented as an excellent alternative to Fastraq, an email management system that was in EOL during the time we were shopping for alternatives. Unfortunately, our originally planned ROI was not achieved due to lost functionality and broken sales promises, leaving us with an email management system that's built more on workarounds than out-of-the-box solutions, requiring considerable time for admin activities that could be avoided by a better-designed system.

Incentivized