SEM Knowledge Management

Problem: Agents give up on the knowledge base

When the knowledge base isn't integrated with your agent desktop, too much time is spent on dead-end search. Agents have to translate the context of the customer conversation into 3-4 keywords and then search the knowledge base. It doesn't take many failed attempts at retrieving answers before an agent starts looking elsewhere to solve problems—a sure route to inconsistent service.

KANA's Knowledge Management integrates your existing knowledge bases with your contact center desktop, automatically feeding the context of the conversation into search. And answers are fed back to agents naturally, as part of their work process, guiding them to consistent, accurate answers and fast resolution.

Problem: Your knowledge base isn't complete

Increasingly, many of the demands put on agents require information that isn't part of a traditional knowledge base—like transactional information from customer information repositories such as orders, billing, reservations and inventory. And many businesses have the relevant data, but aren't making use of it. Fortunately, SEM Knowledge Management provides a good solution. It extends the reach of the knowledge base to all enterprise data, including external systems, and makes it available across your agents and communication channels.

Next: Key Capabilities

Far-reaching knowledge base

The knowledge base spans all your data repositories providing agents with vastly better resources for handling any kind of service interaction. A single knowledge base improves accuracy and ensures consistency across agents and communication channels.

Context-driven search for better answers fast

Context-driven search draws on a wealth of contextual information—customer value, inquiry type, previous purchases and more—to infer customer intent and deliver the right answer, right away. Agents are guided through the service interaction toward the best possible resolution in the shortest amount of time.

Design the agent experience in real time

Customer service managers use drag-and-drop design tools to quickly categorize content for any number of knowledge bases. Without any coding, service managers can streamline the agent workflow and easily configure it to meet the needs of different customer segments.

Capture front-line intelligence

Make the most of your agents' expertise—capture and re-use knowledge from front-line experiences with real-time authoring tools that enable authorized agents to contribute solution content as they resolve inquiries.

One source. Many views.

Create a flexible and secure knowledge base by enabling administrators to specify entitlements at the granular level. Entitlements can be applied at form level, template level or even field level. User interfaces can also be tagged for access by certain types of users or roles.

Next: Unique Difference

The Knowledge Base that keeps on growing

To provide efficient service, answers need to be easy to find, but they also need to be informative and actionable. And that's what SEM Knowledge Management delivers—the right answers, right to agents—right from the knowledge base. The universal knowledge base goes far beyond the traditional knowledge base to span all enterprise data, including a wealth of transactional data, knowledge about customers and previous purchases. It's a far stronger resource for agents and what makes context-driven search possible. All the information is in the knowledge base, but all the answers are at your agents' fingertips.

And it doesn't stop there. Real-time authoring tools enable authorized agents to contribute solution content as they resolve inquiries, continuously building it out and making it better. Customer service managers can point-and-click their way to create an unlimited number of virtual knowledge bases, tailored to support the needs and requirements of a particular business process.

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