KANA Express, discontinued vs. Webex Contact Center

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

It depends on your needs. If you only need simple call flows, consider using Cisco Webex Calling Auto-Attendant. If you require more complex call flows and time-of-day routing, you can utilize Cisco Webex Contact Center. You only have to purchase 1 Agent to use the Call Flow Designer.

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

• Things that it does particularly well include a really good UX or UI so that our agents as well as our administrators, can easily provide remote access from agents, new agents, and old agents, manage interactions with customers, and have a good call experience from start to finish.
• The uptime is a big selling point of Cisco.
• I feel supposed by Cisco in terms of new features/functionality coming down the line.

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

• Better integration with Webex Calling.
• More on premise features integrated into the cloud solution.
• Better documentation for pebble templates.
• Better information for changes and when new features are available. Instead of having to look on the what’s coming webpage alerts or a pop-up inside Webex control hub would be nice.

Incentivized

We are happy with the product, with Cisco as a partner and the roadmap looks mightily impressive. Webex Contact Center is one of our growth areas so we're keen to get more agents on the platform, we want to get more customers on it and we want to make use of all the features and functionalities it offers, so that we can help our customers do what they do best.

It is great to use Webex Contact Center as it delivers the call routing and workflow for agent and call routing. In addition to this the noise reduction helps to focus attention on the call and with the client. The notes feature and the ability for the transcription really helps with translation and language barriers.

Incentivized

Webex Contact Center works great in conjunction with the above product to produce a better system from businesses and more options to reach the maximum number of clients to make the business thrive. It makes it easier to reach all generations and remove any limitation or obstetrical and makes the business have a better chance of success.

Incentivized

• 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

• No Capex required for this solution (which makes our CFO very happy)
• Digital channels are builtin and therefore very easy to deploy
• The built in CRM integration was missing features so we had to install a thirdparty connector which we had to pay for (and wasn't in our budget) in order to get the features which our business demanded

Incentivized