Verint Express (formerly KANA Express) was a cloud-based multi-channel customer engagement / experience platform that was owned and supported by Verint since that company's 2014 acquisition of KANA Software. The product has since been discontinued.
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Medallia
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Medallia is an enterprise customer feedback solution that allows companies to collect customer feedback across multiple channels and touchpoints, and analyze, understand and react to it in real time.
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.
Any customer service industry would benefit from implementing Medallia. This is your one-stop-shop for everything surveying and data analytics. I have personally seen this successfully implemented in both software companies and retail. Medallia offers multiple integration options to create connected applications in your business. This is designed as an enterprise solution, smaller businesses may find it difficult to justify the cost.
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.
Our service model does not provide any ownership over the platform. We have to engage our Medallia Project Team to build surveys, troubleshoot issues, make changes to surveys, reports, and dashboards, resulting in long turnaround times and inefficiency.
Medallia charges for both "units" and users. "Units" are defined as named individuals in surveys, but don't have log-in privileges. In our case, they are customer service agents or business consultants that engaged with the client but are not part of our closed-loop case management process or access to the platform.
Medallia's user interface is simple and intuitive for the end-user. Everyone in our organization from the CEO to store level team members use Medallia to see how we are delivering experiences for our customers. From an administrative side, I would rate Medallia closer to a 7.5, but this part of Medallia is not used as often post-implementation. That being said, you will need a technical/IT resource on staff or will need to pay a premium to a 3rd party to manage it for you.
Medallia is always there to answer questions and/or support our needs. In some cases it does require a PO if the request does not fall under normal support, but that does not change the fact that they are very responses and available to support your needs
We are also using Salesforce.com for our customers/clients' records, usage, cases, and such. Like Medallia, we are using Salesforce.com to understand the different account usage based on the services we provide. With the data provided by Salesforce.com, we would understand where we are lacking, which parts we are strong in, and which part of the service needs improvement. All in all, both products are very helpful and, [conveniently,] both are integrated into one another.
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.
It does play a big role when we are running a referral campaign. Referral greatly affects sales and retention since customers are bringing in new clients/customers.
It helps our organization keep track of the accounts that are most likely to churn by checking their feedback and knowing how we can improve our service.
