Verint Express (formerly KANA Express) was a cloud-based multi-channel customer engagement / experience platform that was owned and supported by Verint since that company's 2014 acquisition of KANA Software. The product has since been discontinued.
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Medallia Agent Connect
Score 6.9 out of 10
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Medallia Agent Connect (based on the former Stella Connect) is a CX suite of applications, performing customer feedback collection and service quality measurement, customer agent motivation tools, and employee engagement tools such as agent reward tools and performance tracking. Stella Connect was acquired by Medallia September 2020.
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.
The survey sent is customer-friendly, vibrant, simple, and easy to understand. The survey itself is comprised of simple question(s) with straightforward answer options for customers to make their selections. Creating the survey is a straightforward process for us to prepare and implement. Making updates or changes is just as easy.
The fundamental tool for customer satisfaction is exactly right. The way they allow us as agents to share details about ourselves, and humanize the process, has made a huge impact on the customer experience we provide. Our customers feel more inclined to leave us feedback and it allows us to get a real understanding of each of their individual expectations.
Customer Journey. From the beginning through the Sales process, through procurement, through trial and through now being users for over a year, the Stella Connect team has been incredibly helpful, informative and has provided us with the exact amount of interaction we need. They are very good at respecting your time while making sure they get in touch when necessary. New features that are relevant to our use case are sent my way. It's one of the only product update emails I actually read. They're incredibly responsive and very helpful.
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.
They are the absolute best. My Sales guy Corey D. and my CSM Tim P. are totally a part of the team. They have been incredibly helpful through the process pre and post-sales and have become good friends. I appreciate that I feel like our team's success is always at the forefront of their minds.
We do not currently use any other products like Stella Connect, by Medallia. We have recently begun evaluating platforms that would allow us to collect feedback at different touchpoints throughout our customers' journeys, as well as through additional channels such as during our application process, quote and purchase experience, website experience, etc. We have looked at companies such as Survey Monkey, Medallia, and Qualtrics to help us better understand CSAT.
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.
Implementing Stella Connect was such an easy decision. Before, we were working with "yes, I'm satisfied" or "no, I'm not satisfied" and felt it was an incredibly unclear and polarizing experience, as our users were forced to pick one or the other. Most often, we'd get a negative rating with a comment saying that the experience was fine, but some feature in the product was missing. This left it very difficult for us to really gauge the experience we were providing and how to improve. In addition, agent motivation was incredibly low and impossible to improve because they were left feeling like their scores were not matching their experience. Needless to say, implementing Stella Connect improved all of these issues 10-fold. The ROI has been incredibly substantial. We've been able to improve CSAT scores and properly measure the rate of first attempt resolutions. Team morale is at an all-time high, and our customers even love the experience.
