Customer service solutions from IBM and KANA

The goal - Balance customer expectations with business objectives

IBM and KANA customer service solutions can give you the speed, agility, and intelligence to create the ideal service experience for your customers at a cost that benefits your business. IBM and KANA have helped companies in every industry discover the power of these solutions to achieve double-digit increases in customer satisfaction while improving agent productivity by as much as 75%. Designed for agile adaptation, IBM and KANA solutions enable you to transform your service operations in minutes, not months, to respond instantly to business opportunities, changing processes, and new regulations.

The advantage - Rely on industry leaders for customer service success

Delivering value to your company through successful technology and services integration is the goal of the partnership between IBM and KANA. Our partnership is based on long-term experience and industry leadership in helping global organizations achieve their customer service goals.

• IBM and KANA are driving success in leading enterprises around the world.
• KANA software is an integral part of the IBM SOA framework solutions for banking, communications, healthcare, and insurance. These frameworks fully integrate KANA software with IBM capabilities to deliver proven, integrated customer service solutions that are SOA-based and support industry-specific business and technology standards.
• Joint implementations in multiple industries — including banking, insurance and financial markets, communications, government, healthcare, and retail — shorten implementation time and quickly deliver business value as KANA software combined with IBM middleware, hardware, and services, deliver a complete customer service solution.
• The experienced support of IBM Global Business Services and KANA professionals offer expertise in customer service best practices, extensive industry knowledge, proven integration tools, and global reach to help you rapidly achieve ROI from your investment in IBM and KANA solutions.

The benefits - Cost-effectively deliver outstanding customer service

IBM and KANA solutions represent one of the best decisions you can make for your customers and your company. Your customers gain highly responsive, consistent, and personalized service delivered across multiple channels. Your company benefits with faster time-to-market, greater agility to respond to change, lower costs for service, compliance with regulations, and the ability to turn service centers into profit centers.

The ROI - Higher customer satisfaction, lower service costs

Based on previous customer implementations, IBM and KANA customer service solutions have helped to:

• Increase customer satisfaction by 15%
• Reduce call handing time by 50% and escalations by 15%
• Deflect calls to Web self-service by 50% and increased self-service adoption by 400%
• Lower agent training costs by 60%

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The goal - Balance customer expectations with business requirements

The challenge for today’s customer service executive is to manage competing key performance indicators including costs, revenue goals, company policies, and customer satisfaction. IBM and KANA offer agile, adaptable solutions to orchestrate service processes, knowledge, and technology to maximize the value of each service interaction and find the right balance between key performance indicators.

The advantage - Proven leadership in customer service solutions

Delivering value to your company through successful technology and services integration is the goal of the partnership between IBM and KANA. Our partnership is based on long-term experience and industry leadership in helping global organizations achieve their customer service goals.

• IBM and KANA are driving success in leading enterprises around the world.
• KANA software is an integral part of the IBM SOA Frameworks for banking, communications, healthcare, and insurance. These frameworks fully integrate KANA software with IBM capabilities to deliver proven, integrated customer service solutions that are SOA-based and support industry-specific business and technology standards.
• Joint implementations in multiple industries including banking, insurance and financial markets, communications, government, healthcare, and retail shorten implementation time and quickly deliver business value as KANA software, IBM middleware, hardware, and services combine to deliver a complete customer service solution.
• The dedicated support of IBM Global Business Services and KANA professionals offer expertise in customer service best practices, extensive industry knowledge, superior integration tools, and global reach to help you rapidly achieve ROI from your investment in IBM and KANA solutions.

The benefits - A balanced scorecard for customer service

IBM and KANA offer complete solutions for service experience management, knowledge management, and eService that enable your organization to deliver the ideal service experience by effectively balancing the key performance indicators for customer service operations. IBM and KANA solutions:

• Adapt instantly to new business opportunities, company requirements, and enterprise growth with a strategic platform for complete service experience management.
• Simplify the process of providing agents and customers with the right information in the shortest amount of time using dynamic, context-driven intelligence and advice.
• Offer consistent service over your customer’s channel of choice with seamless multi-channel solutions.
• Provide open, scalable, and adaptable service-oriented architecture for multi-channel customer service which eliminate technology barriers to create flexible service processes, personalize the customer experience, deliver knowledge at the moment of need, and achieve the right balance between cost, customer satisfaction, risk, and revenue.

The approach - Proven assessment methodology delivers actionable plan for improvement

IBM and KANA work closely with you to develop a comprehensive roadmap that aligns the customer service implementation with identifiable business needs and goals. Using a proven service experience assessment methodology and tools, IBM and KANA assess the state of your customer service capabilities and deliver a roadmap with the associated ROI in less than one week.

The IBM and KANA assessment methodology provides a thorough, independent evaluation of your service processes. The assessment will help you benchmark your organization against industry best practices and set achievable business goals that can deliver an outstanding customer service experience at a cost that benefits your business.

The financial advantage - Higher customer satisfaction, lower service costs

Based on previous customer implementations, IBM and KANA customer service solutions have:

• Increased customer satisfaction by 15%
• Reduced call handing time by 50% and escalations by 15%
• Deflected calls to Web self-service by 50% and increased self-service adoption by 400%
• Lowered agent training costs by 60%

For example, TD Waterhouse UK achieved higher agent productivity and customer satisfaction using IBM and KANA solutions. The goal for TD Waterhouse UK was to achieve greater productivity and customer satisfaction with its call center service. With the help of IBM and KANA, TD Waterhouse UK now offers unparalleled telephone support using an integrated solution that provides agents with the knowledge and intelligence they need to quickly resolve inquiries across multiple brands. Agents can find answers regardless of the call type, enabling them to complete more “one and done” calls and focus on quality and service.

The implementation has proven highly successful with:

• Customer satisfaction increased by 12%
• Back office escalations reduced 16%
• Errors reduced 44% and hold times down more than 23%

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The issues - Optimize service delivery with SOA-architected solutions

Today's difficult economy has increased the pressure on customer service and IT organizations to respond faster to changing business conditions, improve the customer experience, reduce service costs, and ensure processes are fully compliant with regulations. These demands require technology that is flexible, highly adaptable, and can help companies balance customer expectations with business goals.

IBM and KANA help companies meet these challenges with SOA solutions that give you the speed, agility, and intelligence to create the ideal service experience. Designed for rapid and easy implementation and integration into the current enterprise environment, these open-standard customer service solutions can help companies achieve the fastest time to value and payback.

The benchmark - Proven hardware and software make the measured difference

Regardless of your architectural preference or specific processing needs, IBM systems and KANA software can be fully integrated into your existing technology environment.

• KANA been delivering proven, successful customer service solutions for more than 10 years. Over 250 companies and 50 of the world's largest 100 companies rely on KANA customer service solutions.
• KANA is the only company that provides complete solutions for the customer service lifecycle with solutions for service experience management, knowledge management, and eService.
• KANA applications are optimized on IBM hardware and software for the highest levels of performance. The open IBM infrastructure delivers a solid foundation that adapts with ease to manage rapid growth and change with proven reliability.

The components - The tools to balance customer expectations with business objectives

Customer service solutions from IBM and KANA combine IBM hardware and services with KANA best-of-breed applications, including:

• KANA Service Experience Management—The first platform for managing the end-to-end service experience, enabling you to orchestrate all your existing processes and technology to deliver optimal service interactions.
• KANA Knowledge Management—Proven solutions for contact centers and customer Web self-service, KANA intelligently guides agents and customers through inquiries to deliver the right answer at the right time.
• KANA eService—Delivers the channel flexibility customers demand with solutions for high-volume, secure email and chat. KANA optimizes eService operations to manage millions of interactions across channels while making it simple for customers to do business with your company.

IBM provides key components, including:

• IBM SOA Foundation — An integrated, open-standards-based set of software, best practices and patterns for Service Oriented Architecture. IBM SOA Foundation helps to extend the value of the applications and business processes that currently run your business, not replace them.
• Middleware—End-to-end IBM middleware solutions transform, integrate, and leverage information to help cost-efficiently manage technology and business.
• Hardware—Servers that provide the scalability and reliability required for millions of customer interactions.
• IBM Global Business Services—IBM Global Business Services offer strategic business consulting, expertise in industry-specific business and IT issues, and an understanding of key solution requirements for enterprises around the world.

The implementation - Joint marketing and support for ideal customer service

As market leaders in the development of emerging technologies and customer service solutions, IBM and KANA have joined together to market and support transformational SOA-based customer service solutions. By embedding the market-leading technology of the IBM SOA Foundation into KANA software, IBM and KANA make it possible to rapidly develop and deliver service interactions which are perfect expressions of a company’s business goals for each customer touch point.

IBM and KANA are building a set of specialized tools and Web services to address the core business needs of customer service organizations. Working together, KANA and IBM are delivering one of the richest examples of the benefits of SOA technology and composite applications. For example, IBM SOA framework solutions for banking, communications, healthcare, and insurance fully integrate KANA software with IBM capabilities to deliver SOA-based customer service solutions that support industry-specific business and technology standards.

The IBM SOA Foundation, embedded in the KANA software, leverages next-generation technology for business process management, knowledge management, Web 2.0, and predictive analytics. Because IBM SOA capabilities are built into the software, IT organizations are not required to fully embrace SOA in order to reap the benefits of this technology. The software abstracts the complexities of the SOA infrastructure through a set of business-friendly tools.

The cost of ownership - SOA-based solutions reduce IT costs for delivering outstanding customer service

Because KANA software is fully integrated with IBM SOA technology, IT organizations gain customer service solutions that help them lower the cost of ownership and reduce the burden on their people. The customer service solutions from IBM and KANA provide:

• A SOA-based platform that manages the complete service process across all interactions and channels.
• Business-level management of customer service processes for instant response to new products, changing procedures, and market opportunities. Service level managers use business-oriented tools to design, deploy, and modify all the resources required for each service experience in just a few minutes, alleviating the burden on IT.
• Intelligent, real-time automation for balancing service KPIs as each service interaction unfolds.
• Scalable, configurable architecture delivered on best-of-breed IBM SOA components that help cost-efficiently leverage corporate information in real time during service interactions.
• Context-driven guidance methods, federated search, expert modeling and real-time content authoring to streamline the process of finding answers and continuously improving knowledge.
• Proven solutions for high volume, secure email and chat interactions in use at hundreds of global enterprises.

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