KANA Express, discontinued vs. Qualtrics XM for Strategy and Research

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

Qualtrics is a good medium for creating surveys and getting analytics back for it. I think it's easy to learn if you are in the business of creating surveys or if it's part of your studies. It can be a little overwhelming for a brand new user who has never created a survey for the first time. So onboarding could be better.

• 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

• Qualtrics CoreXM is easy to use for quick one-time surveys or for measuring opinions over time
• It's great for sending/managing RSVPs for meetings or other gatherings or to collect important data like Conflict of Interest declarations.
• Qualtrics CoreXM's reporting and crosstab functionality is beefy and gets better all of the time. I'm always amazed at how easy it is to generate reports for sharing my survey response data and research.

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

• The collaborate feature can be clunky and sometimes we have to remove access and add a person back in for them to see the survey in their lists
• We have a contract through our university and more than one person has created their account in the wrong place, causing some administrative headaches as that is fixed so that we can collaborate on surveys with them.
• I wish it was easier to organize my surveys into folders, there should be a more efficient way to do that.

Incentivized

I was impressed a couple years ago when two heads of market research at Fortune 500 companies told me about them, and I've been even more impressed with the advancements I've seen in the last year. I like where the company is headed, and I look forward to using them again in a future role.

All the menus are very user friendly and intuitive. I can always find exactly what I'm looking for and can change anything I need to with ease. All the elements of the survey are adjustable with very little effort and without confusion.

Whenever we have had an issue with trying to figure out how to do something (even though the documentation is incredibly well put together) we have asked Qualtrics support and have always received our answer nearly immediately (I think in maybe 10 times, only once did a support person need to call us back). Qualtrics support is dedicated to solving customer issues right, and in the first contact, if at all possible

I still use it. It does everything you need an online survey to do. From heat mapping to complex skip logic and display logic. I use it weekly and it never disappoints

I like being able to easily integrate new colleagues by simply giving them a log in user name and password

]Qualtrics] CoreXM is great if you want something that is a little more [long] lasting and impactful than a simple survey engine, but aren't quite ready for something that is a long term sustainable program. I would put [Qualtrics] CoreXM squarely in the large, defined project phase. CX is more of the program phase, and other lessor vendors are great for the pre-project definition phase

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

• Increased productivity due to the highly intuitive user-interface and template saving capabilities.
• Reporting and analytics are extremely valuable. Our team can track responses and share feedback/results extremely quickly.
• If a user has created a great template, they can share to external teams quite easily. It helps other departments!

Incentivized