Chameleon vs. KANA Express, discontinued

Seems like a great solution for web-based apps and sites when you want to communicate with your users in a fairly lightweight way. Users can "escape" from your guided tours relatively easily. Not sure how it would work for a combined web and mobile experience. Also, if you have a responsive layout, the layout of the guide sometimes breaks - you have to be careful

Incentivized

If your business has more than 50 users, don't use KANA Express. User management and setup is not intuitive, and back-end email management takes a large amount of time. If your business emails more than one recipient and expects replies from more than one recipient, don't use KANA Express. The system is built for one-question-in, one-answer-out. Anything more than that requires extra customization or is impossible, according to their development team. If managing your inbound email either internally or externally is critical to your operations, don't use KANA Express. Downtime is more frequent than is acceptable, and their Netherlands advanced support team's hours make down-time in the western hemisphere a lot longer than it needs to be.

Incentivized

• Super easy installation/setup particularly if you use Segment.
• Improved and relatively easy to learn UI.
• Great minimal/elegant design of the elements that get displayed to your users.

Incentivized

• Allows you to manage multiple email queues with different business rules.
• User interface is somewhat intuitive, allowing users to navigate fairly easily.
• Admin controls allow for a considerable variety of customization.

Incentivized

• There are not quite as many interactive elements as I'd like to see, but enough to get the job done.
• The general editing UI is good, but some of the elements could be easier to discover. You sort of have to trial-and-error your way to success.
• Documentation is fairly light. If you really want to dig in, you'll find it lacking. Luckily support was awesome and fast.

Incentivized

• KANA Express is NOT set up for business models where email is conversational and involves multiple recipients and responses. If your business model is one-question-in, one-answer-out, then KANA Express will probably work for you.
• Since signing on with them, KANA Express' support team has been severely lacking in expertise and acceptable turnaround times, especially when the platform encounters a system-wide issue to leads to downtime. Our assigned sales contacts jumped ship with the company almost immediately after we went live, which is never a good sign.
• Admin panel and functions are very antiquated and not user-friendly at all. Email management through the admin tool lacks crucial insight that prevents admin users from being able to easily route and manage emails. Our organization had to write our own KANA user guides that KANA Express then took and started using themselves and for other clients.
• The KANA Express platform does not have proper spam or auto-reply management tools. Admin users must manually turn off the KANA Express auto-response emails in order to prevent email loops with other parties' auto-responses.
• Analytics options are lacking. Admin users must run at least three separate reports in order to gather appropriate insight as to user activities and metrics.
• Email queue/user set up is not intuitive. If adding a new queue or user, all users must be manually adjusted to include that new queue. There is no mass-edit tool for KANA Express users.

Incentivized

We had some colleagues try to implement WalkMe with their Single page app and it was a disaster getting it to work (it eventually did, mostly). Because we already use Segment, we thought we'd give Chameleon a try and it was very easy. I built my first tour in an hour or two.

Incentivized

• Saved us time/money building extensive documentation.
• Quicker to implement a few other solutions. We have access to an enterprise product for FREE, but we chose not to use it because implementation was too cumbersome.

Incentivized

• KANA Express was originally presented as an excellent alternative to Fastraq, an email management system that was in EOL during the time we were shopping for alternatives. Unfortunately, our originally planned ROI was not achieved due to lost functionality and broken sales promises, leaving us with an email management system that's built more on workarounds than out-of-the-box solutions, requiring considerable time for admin activities that could be avoided by a better-designed system.

Incentivized