TMC Labs INNOVATION AWARDS: Part II

Customer Inter@ction Solutions, Oct 2004 by Keating, Tom

The TMC Labs Innovation Awards are intended to provide special recognition to products that help carve a new market niche or start a new trend. These awards highlight what is special about them and what sets them apart from their competitors due to one or more unique and innovative features. This is our fifth annual installment of the TMC Labs Innovation Awards for Customer Inter@ction Solutions® magazine.

We examined a plethora of applications, checked customer references, extensively researched the products, debatour selections and finally came up with the crème de le crème of 26 winners within the customer interaction space. Part II of the winners list is presented here, beginning with Kanisa and ending with Witness Systems. Part I of the winners list was featured in the September 2004 issue of Customer Inter@ction Solutions® magazine and can be accessed online at www.tmcnet.com.

We offer sincerest congratulations to all the winners.

Kanisa

Kanisa5

www.kanisa.com

Kanisa's application suite, Kanisa5, is a complete suite of knowledge-empowered customer service applications that provide knowledge management (KM) as well as CRM capabilities. The goal of Kanisa's suite is to automate the problem-resolution process, which improves agent productivity and increases customer satisfaction, both of which provide cost savings and fill in the large gap left by non-automated or incomplete customer service applications.

Kanisa5 integrates all support center channels with one knowledge platform and includes:

Kanisa Support Center: allows agents to use one application to access all content, regardless of where it resides, regardless of the channel of inquiry. With the ability to access disparate information repositories - both internal and external/structured and unstructured data - agents reduce call time and increase first-call resolution.

Kanisa Support Site: a powerful self-service application that empowers customers with knowledge to solve problems online.

Kanisa Site Search: provides customers and Web site visitors with a robust NLP search engine to navigate the site, find information and get answers - regardless of data location and structure.

Kanisa Expert Forums: enables collaboration among customer and user communities.

Some of the product's key features include interview scripting, collaboration, the ability to integrate disparate content sources and personalized self-service.

Kanisa5 automates the service-resolution process by combining robust KM technology with rich application capabilities. Kanisa5 fits under the relatively new Service Resolution Management (SRM) category, which allows companies to effectively bridge KM and CRM with a holistic enterprisewide integrated knowledge platform.

Also, Kanisa touts its "Universal Knowledge Integration and Access" features. The company states that Kanisa5 is the only product to simultaneously access structured and unstructured data in response to a single query. Kanisa makes this possible by automatically integrating and tagging disparate content sources from across the enterprise.

Kanisa also declares that the Kanisa Support Center module is the first application that integrates comprehensive resolution functionality, applies workflow to the entire resolution process and leverages a unified knowledge management platform. The Kanisa5 application suite takes disparate KM tools from support organizations and creates a holistic application, eliminating the need to have multiple windows open. Agents no longer need to mine various data sources from various applications to solve customer problems. Kanisa5 brings all of those tools into one cohesive application.

KnowledgeBase Solutions, Inc.

KnowledgeBase.net

version 4.0

www.knowledgebase.net

KnowledgeBase.net is one of the most powerful knowledge base solutions on the market today to bridge two disciplines: knowledge management and online self-service/CRM. Designed around Microsoft .NET, it leverages the numerous .NET programmers and .NET applications that can be tightly coupled with this solution. It comes in three flavors:

* KnowledgeBase.net Enterprise Edition, which targets Global 2000 companies with call centers;

* KnowledgeBase.net Hosted Edition for small and mid-sized companies; and

* KnowledgeBase.net Professional Edition for the small/SOHO market.

KnowledgeBase.net features tight Windows integration. One unique Windows integration feature is the ability to "right mouse click" a document and send it directly to the knowledge base from any desktop. This makes creating new knowledge base entries very easy. KnowledgeBase.net also has the ability to automatically convert any of these files to HTML, if so desired, or they can be kept in their inherent file format (PDF, Word, Excel, etc.).

Additionally, it is fully interoperable with .NET so that other .NET applications can be seamlessly integrated. HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and Active Server Pages (ASP) code seamlessly integrate with any of KnowledgeBase.net's portal, search or article display functionality. The company says it offers the first knowledge base solution accessible via PocketPCs. Also, KnowledgeBase.net Enterprise Edition integrates with LDAP protocols, such as Microsoft's Active Directory, for easy user name and password management.