KANA Express, discontinued vs. Satmetrix (discontinued)

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

Satmetrix is best suited if you don't currently use Salesforce. A lot of its main selling points are negated by the virtue of having Salesforce. Case management is in Salesforce, reporting is in Salesforce, the structure that NPX imposes is actually clunky and unwieldy, and is much more streamlined on competing platforms such as GetFeedback and SurveyMonkey. The only thing that leaves is the consultative service on being best practice and I don't really get to see any of that.

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

• Ease of use; SaaS solution, all web based - simple, straightforward and easy to use
• Multi lingual; we are able to use multiple languages for our surveys
• Reporting is very flexible; reports can be run for pretty much any data point that you can capture!

• 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

• Implementation did not go as well as planned and there were problems.
• If you are running multiple surveys, slicing and dicing data is not that simple.

Incentivized

The previous experience was so negative that even if they have improved since then it wouldn't help. Another more pertinent reason is because we have an existing 3 year contract with Medallia. Lastly, vendor transitions in our environment (B2B in 132 countries) is extremely painful. I've managed two of them and wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.

Incentivized

I haven't evaluated any other products. Our executive team selected NPS as the preferred measurement of customer sentiment and Satmetrix is the only certification company I am aware of.

• 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

• With the knowledge gained front he transactional surveys, Satmetrix helped us significantly improve our customer service processes.
• Combined with the relationship survey, we were ultimately able to improve our customer retention by over 20% within 2 years.

Incentivized