Sustained Seat Support

Kanisa is about finding information fast, be it through customer self-help or collaboration tools for agents. The company, known for its customer Web self-help solutions, is releasing Kanisa5 on Monday July 21, featuring Kanisa Support Center to help customer service reps by automating problem resolution. In the past agents had to manually find the right resolution to help customers, "but the content is spread out over a bunch of content repositories," says Ben Kaplan, vice president of marketing at Kanisa. To find the right person to address a problem, agents would have to walk away from their cubicles or pop their heads up and shout for extra support--a tactic that Kaplan jokingly refers to as sneakernet or prairie-dog collaboration . That's why the upgrades, Kaplan says, have been tailored to agents' workflow. Kanisa5, which comes less than a year after the release of Kanisa4 (last fall), is designed to improve agent productivity and reduce incident volume. Kanisa aims to do this by incorporating various features like one-click CRM--data access that integrates to applications from companies like Siebel, Amdocs, and PeopleSoft; self-learning guided-search capabilities that guide agents to the most appropriate information for diagnosis and problem resolution; interview scripting; collaboration capabilities that help agents digitally connect to experts via a digital chat forum, (obviating the need for an agent to leave his or her desk); automated response templates; and prepopulated case notes that automatically stores the details of each customer interaction in the CRM system. Also new to the Kanisa customer support solution is its Resolution Flow Engine. The business rules engine guides agents through an optimized resolution process and reveals the resolution functionality, knowledge, processes, and tools to support the agent based on incident and customer specifics; provides packaged industry-specific resolution flows; and comes with administration and configuration capabilities for managers. Earlier this month Kanisa completed its acquisition of Jeeves Solutions, including the JeevesOne technology, which Kaplan says helps Kanisa round out its services solutions with a presales support product. Customers can use the JeevesOne solution to conduct searches that may facilitate a purchase. "We have traditionally focused on support and Jeeves has seen its best use in helping presales support," says Mark Angel, CTO and cofounder of Kanisa. Now, under the Kanisa umbrella, the Jeeves solution will be dubbed Kanisa Site Search, which uses natural language search capabilities to understand customers in their own words when querying companies for sales, marketing, or customer service information."