Likelihood to Recommend I would recommend it to other people in my contact and business circle, but if I recommend it to someone who has certain difficulties in accessing some tools within Cisco, he may have great difficulty in getting help because of the support that is lacking in most of the times.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Provides you with a solid routing engine that was built to handle Service Provider level throughput - if you need stability and a work horse this is the platform for you. The core features on the whole are good, but where UCCE is very good is the eco-system of Solutions Plus partner integrations that expand on the core capabilities with the market leaders in areas such as WFO, Campaign Management, Biometrics and Natural Language. The investment Cisco makes in the CC space means they are always improving the platform features, scale and reliability. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons After 25+ years, the product still requires experienced and highly skilled engineers to deploy the product properly per Cisco Best Practice guidelines. Third-party integrations are also very cumbersome and require highly skilled and experienced engineers and significant time and financial investment to deploy. Upgrading the product is cumbersome and requires Cisco ATP or Cisco AS which is time consuming and very expensive. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew if it is up to me I would maintain its use. I was not able to make those decisions previously.
Read full review Usability To be honest, there are tools better than Cisco Unified Contact Center because it largely depends on third party integrations with better alternatives available now a days. However, Cisco Unified Contact Center has its own standards in terms of user experience and client satisfactions which serves every customers with a flawless experience.
Read full review Support Rating Cisco Unified Contact center is a very smart & reliable solution to go for. Its active-active sight base architecture and [customizable] features really help to deliver efficient customer service, enhanced next-gen experience, and uninterrupted operations. I believe every [organization] should opt for it if required.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Similar I guess, however, I feel like Avaya was more suited for a contact center and allowed for all information to be in one place. The QA Forms were more flexible and easy to review. Predicative analysis was available to assist with scheduling and staffing. It was easier to manipulate and implement- I didn't need to go through 3 different parties to make a simply modification.
Read full review Contract Terms and Pricing Model Licenses are very expensive. The customer has to buy IP telephony or Unified Communication and Collaboration Licenses and for Contact Center Solution licenses separately. There must be a price tone down as the competition is really high. New customers are willing to go for cloud-based solutions [that] are cheaper and easy to deploy.
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Read full review Return on Investment A smoother route to helping end users with critical needs With quick assist while on hold, less calls come into the pool while agents have the ability to assist more critical needs The ability to work remotely during an extreme event assisting end users Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots