KANA Express, discontinued vs. Quadient Inspire

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

Quadient Inspire is well suited to complex processes and requests. It is very well designed software which includes numerous plug in options for ease of use with other software. They have built in security functions to protect intellectual property and prohibit unauthorized changes. This software is great for people who need control and large feature sets or work with quantities in the millions. Of course, it also works fine on smaller projects. Where it would be overkill is for environments which only need simple variable pieces. Just setting up an address block? If this is your regular job, this software is excessive

Incentivized

• 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

• Highly flexible data ingestion
• Clear and powerful workflow design that makes support easy to understand as teams evolve
• Great internal debugging tool that simplifies and accelerates the development cycle
• Powerful scripting structure available at nearly every aspect of data management, composition, and finishing allowing for specialized requirements not available in the standard toolset to be met

Incentivized

• 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

• Usually quick to de-bug/resolve any issues, currently having a problem saving production profiles. Its more of a little annoyance than a problem and its not a time consuming fix. Maybe I'm just being lazy..
• No more issues that I have currently come across that haven't already been resolved.

We are using Quadient Inspire products since last 5 years. And we are able to achieve everything with respect to the customer's needs and desired output. Quadient is adding new very important features every day that make document structure very easy for developers and end users. We would like to stick with Quadient for a long time.

There are parts of the product that are extremely easy to use, but it can be hard to build it up to get to that point. I'm a power user and I know I've only barely scratched the surface, but the transactional users barely have to lift a finger to get their letters out. There's a lot more that can be done if I had the time and resources to devote to improving our letters more and there are times when the interface is in my way as to meeting those goals, but by and large, it's a swift and easy to use program.

I am giving this rating because Quadient products are highly available. Most of the time all Quadient products are available. In some cases Quadient always follows the planned schedule and maintenance. They always inform all the partners and clients a day or two in advance so that the clients can work accordingly.

I want you to rate the performance of the Quadient Inspire 9 out of 10. Because every time we work with Quadient products I never feel any sluggishness and any performance issue. Along with this, one thing that we all should understand is that the performance of any application also depends on the computer hardware. So along with the software application, your hardware should also meet the minimum requirements.

Overall Quadient team is very responsive and willing to come to the table and provide valuable information and resolution for problems. What tier of support you have would defiantly impact the experience you have. Had some challenges with a few members of the support team , but when brought up with the vendor it was quickly resolved

Incentivized

I had a couple of weeks of training back in 2005 on the Quadient premises in Hradec Kralowe. The instructor was just great! Besides showing as normal functionalities, he went so far to solve our concrete challenges. He actually encouraged me to become a "real" programmer. I have written my first lines of code in Inspire (GMC PrintNetT) and never looked back.

Quadient offers online training for all of its products (paid service). You can choose your pace and go through the material and then solve real challenges. At the end, you can choose to take a final assignment and get certification which is a really good thing to do. If you get stuck, the training team will answer any of your questions and give you guidance.

As you consider your digital transformation, think of the people who may object. They have valid criticisms, valuable insights and information critical to your success. Quadient’s advice is to build a strong internal team and confront these questions early. When everyone understands the project from their perspective, the project has a better chance of success.

Quadient Inspire is more user friendly as compared to OpenText Exstream. The user interface, the options for editing are very simple in Quadient Inspire, we can see in the layout what all options do we need, which is a bit complex in OpenText Exstream. Both are CCM solutions but vary a bit in terms of user friendliness.

Incentivized

I am giving this rating because Quadient products are very reliable. Quadient products can be deployed across multiple departments and sites as needed. We can integrate Quadient products with other applications and tools in a very effective, efficient and flexible way. We can deploy Quadient products in Cloud as well.

• 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

• We've restructured the entire organization on customer journey based on the understanding gain by mapping customer touchpoints from their perspective instead of business processes
• We have been able to reduce SLAs for comms changes from 8 weeks to 5 days using Quadient Inspire tools and bringing this in-house.
• We have also standardized templates and reduced the number of variants of comms be being able to build once and deploy across multiple channels.