SEM Web Self-Service

Online frustration ends up burdening your contact center

Just making online services available to customers doesn't get them very far. Customers can typically search static information but not query into transactional information. And when transacting business, customers can't search for information elsewhere on the website without abandoning their transaction and rekeying their entries—and that's when customers rightly will reach for the phone.

KANA addresses this problem by going well beyond traditional search. As customers navigate self-service, they are provided with relevant information within the context of their task, as well as the option of seeking more information along the way to actually solve the problem online. Easily incorporated into your current website, KANA Web Self-Service reduces online abandonment rates. It's used worldwide to support thousands of products and services.

Next: Key Capabilities

Search extends to transactions

Search extends reach beyond knowledge bases to transactional systems. It increases the accuracy of answers so customers can accomplish more without assistance. Customers can now find answers to questions like "what is the status of my order" or "what is my account balance," without needing to contact an agent.

Context-driven search

In a single, easy-to-use interface, the Visual Experience Designer provides the tools needed to create service workflows, build screens and design business logic—in minutes. The Experience Orchestrator implements the experience across functionalities and back-end data, leading service reps and customers through the desired flow. And the KPI Optimizer monitors and fine-tunes the service experience to meet the objectives you set for cost, customer satisfaction, compliance and revenue.

Agile channeling

Context-aware, Web Self-Service seamlessly transitions customers from an online problem to agent assistance. The system automatically determines the appropriate channel—whether email, chat or phone—to direct an escalation, based on the value of the transaction or the severity of the issue. Agents have a full history of the self-service session and can help through email or chat, and even co-browse web pages with customers.

Design Customer Journeys

Service managers can point and click their way to the ideal online experience for any number of customer segments or types of inquiries. New flows and information are easily added. And change in response to feedback is easily implemented to continuously make the customer experience better.

Email

Intelligent message handling and scripted answers let you respond faster to customers, using less of your agents' time. KANA's email management system is designed to handle exponential increases in customer inquiries, protecting you from backlogs of unanswered requests and unhappy customers.

Learn More

Chat

Web Self-Service alerts agents to problems and enables them to engage in multiple live chat sessions simultaneously. Scripted sessions increase efficiency and ensure compliance. Problems are automatically routed to the relevant party such as sales or technical support.

For chat and collaboration purposes, built-in security ensures compliance with corporate and legal privacy requirements. Co-browsing is limited to appropriate URLs and encryption and user authentication keep data private throughout chat sessions.

Learn More

Secure messaging

A secure Web portal enables confidential email communication without the need for cumbersome encryption and decryption applications. Customers can be sure their information is protected, encouraging them to use email even for sensitive matters.

Next: Unique Difference

Good service is productive and personal

SEM Web Self-Service makes your business, knowledge and community data accessible on the web and across communication channels. That's a good starting point for any service organization, but KANA takes data accessibility another big step forward to deliver actionable knowledge to customers in the context of their task.

Knowledge infuses the process, bringing relevant information and functions directly to the customer. Contextual widgets enable customers to access information and transact business simultaneously. It cuts down on the time and frustration spent on search and enables customers to actually achieve what they came for—and keeps them coming back.

What's more, service is highly personalized. User identities and context-driven processes infer customer intent and respond accordingly, and search histories are preserved so that customers can return to a problem without starting the process over. The customer experience is intuitive and rewarding, and service managers have advanced tools to monitor and continually improve it. New Experience Flows™ are easily created to provide the best experience for each customer segment.

Next: Architecture

Leveraging SOA and your existing technology

The SEM platform leverages your existing technology investments by integrating with your enterprise data, applications, and messaging systems. The platform is designed and built on service-oriented architecture (SOA) standards. That means costly point-to-point integration and application upgrades are simplified, unburdening IT in the process.

IT and business—finally on the same page

The Design-Orchestrate-Listen methodology, the cornerstone of SEM, enables interfaces to be created visually and/or automatically. Any enterprise system can be tapped into—typically without requiring re-write or replacement. That means business can respond rapidly to change without putting additional strain on IT.

Adapts to users. Adapts to context.

Service experiences, delivered through the adaptive desktop, are consistent across communication channels—phone, email, chat and social communities—even when your customer base doubles in size or product development takes an unexpected turn. Business is happy. Customers are happy. And IT, well, they just can't stop smiling.

KANA Services: Building blocks of a customer service solution

Don't write code. Use KANA's Services for Messaging, Knowledge Management and Case Management. SEM blends Knowledge Management into case management to create a new generation of knowledge-infused customer service solutions. SEM also is BPM for the customer service process: the first true example of the power of standards-based BPM principles being applied to a process-specific SOA platform. Messaging services provide gateways to customer conversation channels – ranging from phone, email, chat and web forms to social channels.

Integration HUB

SEM is able to Orchestrate across all of your data, transactions and content because the DOL methodology is hitched to a powerful Integration Hub. KANA understands that delivering technology components or parts of a solution isn't sufficient to meet the demands of today's customer service organisations. KANA also realises that it will always be necessary to integrate with other corporate solutions, therefore part of the power of KANA SEM comes from providing not only a cohesive and adaptable Service Experience Management solution but one which also provides refined access to your other enterprise systems.

Analytics your way

You can use the immense power of reports, dashboards and analytics that come out-of-the-box with KANA SEM. Or you can integrate with the Business Intelligence tool of your choice.

The incredibly context-rich, cross-channel session information that flows from the SEM platform provides significantly better grist for your BI mill. Much better, much more granular information about the service experience means your standard reporting & analytics tools will yield greater insight. More significantly, SEM uses that insight to drive real-time optimization.

Multiple delivery options

SEM can be deployed on premise or in the cloud—whichever best meets your needs and budget requirements.

Next: Overview