KANA Express, discontinued vs. Zoho Survey

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

Like all Zoho products, if you are using Zoho CRM than I would highly recommend Zoho Survey. The insights you can get out of staying only in one program (Zoho CRM) is so powerful for users. While it takes an admin or marketing person to configure the surveys in Zoho Survey, users within Zoho CRM never have to actually go to Zoho Survey to see responses as they are available right in front of them in the CRM. If you are looking for a stand alone survey app, Zoho Survey will meet your needs. It has all the functionality one could need to build a basic, intuitive survey. If you're looking for a survey to be very aesthetically pleasing with graphics or custom themes or the like, there may be better options.

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

• Lets us get feedback from clients on how they felt the Engineer did.
• It shows us the knowledge needs if any for each engineer and shows and tells us what to improve on.
• Allows us to have an organized way to audit the first line of support calls and services and the volume of traffic we get month to month.

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

• It can be a little "clunky" if you are not experienced in how Zoho Products work
• The pricing is a little harder to grasp than other products
• Customization is not as flexible as some other products out there

Incentivized

Zoho Survey is really easy to use. We've used Doodle and Survey Monkey in the past, and Zoho Social is just as easy, if not easier to use.

Incentivized

Zoho's support is always quick to respond and troubleshoot any issues

Incentivized

(Other survey apps were not listed to choose from, so this section is irrelevant). Compared to Doodle or Survey Monkey, Zoho Survey has everything you need in a survey app as part of your Zoho One suite. It can also integrate well with Zoho's other apps to get a more complete data picture on your contacts.

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

• It's all positive because we use it solely for NPS which, if taken seriously, can definitely assist in making your company successful!

Incentivized