With almost 20 years of experience in providing strategic process and organizational policy advice for both public and private organizations in various industries, Kirsten Bay will step in as the new president and CEO of Attensity, succeeding Mr. Ian Bonner, who will now serve as Attensity’s chairman of the board.

Previous to her new role at Attensity, Ms. Bay specialized in strategic processes and served as an organizational policy advisor, drawing on her experience in the information management, finance, and product industries. Ms. Bay has also served as vice president of commercial business with iSIGHT Partners.

“I am thrilled to join Attensity at such an exciting time. Attensity is truly the pioneer in developing analytic and engagement products powered by semantic technologies. Mining big data has created a terrific opportunity for Attensity to apply its text analytics and customer engagement solutions in large corporations and the public sector,” mentioned Ms. Bay in regard to her new role within the company. Read the rest of this entry »

The multi-channel customer experience management software market represents an attractive US$5 billion-plus market opportunity, which IDC recently forecast to grow at between 5 to 12 percent through 2015 (a 6 percent compound annual growth rate [CAGR]) within the larger overall customer relationship management (CRM) space. To that end, in July 2012, KANA Software, a longstanding customer service software provider, which has lately been on an impressive comeback and acquisition trail, announced that it has acquired the upbeat and innovative contact center customer service company Ciboodle from the Sword Group.

The official press release cites that this move creates a more powerful independent provider for multi-channel customer service solutions across agent, web, social, and mobile experiences. The acquisition is further evidence of consolidation in this attractive sector, as marked by Oracle’s acquisitions of RightNow, InQuira, and several smaller social computing companies, and salesforce.com’s acquisitions of inStranet, Radian 6, and other smaller companies. Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Yammer might also have some relevance to this CRM segment. Read the rest of this entry »

KANA Software is a global provider in customer service solutions delivered on-premise or in the cloud, and these solutions unify and maintain context for customer journeys across agent, Web, social, and mobile experiences. The vendor’s solutions have reduced handling time, increased resolution rates, and improved net promoter score (NPS) at more than 850 enterprises, including half of the Global 100 and more than 250 government agencies.

The KANA Service Experience Management (SEM) platform combines the realms of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Business Process Management (BPM), Knowledge Management, Text Analytics, and Social Media to support the delivery of good experiences on brands and on budget across multiple customer interaction channels. Most recently, at the IQPC 2012 Call Center Week event, the vendor introduced new capabilities in its enterprise customer service solution, designed to support the new strategic imperative in Web Customer Service (WCS) — customer acquisition. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series presented the opportunity of service economy and associated complexity of providing consistently an experience of customer service excellence. The article then introduced KANA Software, a provider of Service Experience Management (SEM) solutions. Although KANA has focused on enabling superior customer service for its enterprise clients since being founded in 1996, it has experienced periods of ups and downs.

Having been acquired and taken private under Accel-KKR in late 2009, the vendor has since regrouped and come out with its renewed value proposition. Part 1 concluded with KANA’s SEM approach and accompanying solutions that blend customer relationship management (CRM), business process management (BPM), business intelligence (BI), and knowledge management (KM), social media monitoring, and many other parts.

Read the rest of this entry »

In this service economy it is not surprising to hear about smart innovative companies whose businesses have been blossoming due to the superior customer service they provide. Zappos and its “Powered by Service” tagline is a crown example.

Many vendors that offer customer service software solutions, especially those that bundle customer relationship management (CRM) with business process management (BPM) capabilities and even infuse knowledge in the service process, have been doing quite well, such as Pegasystems, SwordCiboodle, salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 3, inQuira, RightNow, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Customer Care Framework (CCF), and so on and so forth. But achieving consistently excellent customer service and satisfaction is not easy by any stretch of imagination. Research shows that over the last 15 years customer satisfaction has dropped by over 20 points (true, we as customers are becoming more fastidious, but that is our right, isn’t it?) while the cost per interaction has more than doubled, in great part due to agents’ errors and repeated service resulting in issue resolution calls.

Read the rest of this entry »

The best way to capture customer experience is without a doubt the ability to interpret real customer sentiment, which is reason enough for Medallia to include text analytics capabilities to its already well-known Customer Experience Management Suite (CEM).

Points of note: this offering integrates fully with Medallia’s CEM solution. The vendor touts its ease of use, as well as the ability for users to acquire fast results and distribute these results across the organization.

In this regard, Borge Hal, CEO and co-founder of Medallia says that “for years, many companies have struggled to effectively understand text-based customer feedback. Companies that lack text analytics solutions devote significant resources to manually summarizing the feedback—they’re engaged in the proverbial search for the needle in the haystack.”

Business intelligence and analytics tools are following an interesting path—either by going vertical, or by being embedded as complementary tools for other business suites. Analytic tools can be now more at the center of the action. You can read the actual press release here.

I welcome your thoughts—leave a comment below, and I’ll respond as soon as I can.