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.
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.
UserZoom is well suited for usability testing, I found specifically around test websites and marketing materials. I was able to invite others to participate and watch as well as screen share so that it was an interactive session. Other tools I have used have been a little better with the video output and transcripts of each session so that we could capture notes quickly, but overall it was a good tool to use to test.
Quantitative testing can be done on the cheap compared to other quant tools or vendors... once you buy the license, you only pay for additional recruiting and you are managing the project, so there isn't the high cost of having other vendors doing the project management or running a survey etc.
Farily robust means of tracking and recording data. I also relied heavily on the excel spreadsheet of all the raw data, which you can have UZ customize for you to get what you need.
Great support system from the UserZoom team - they have researchers who can help with coding and also provide research support for a very good price.
Also they have tree testing, card sorting, survey capabilities (in addition to usability testing)... and mobile testing. and they seem to be continously be developing the tool to support additional methods.
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.
Compared with some other tools, because their video conferencing platform is web-based (vs. using Zoom, which has a desktop app), I find the connection buffers a lot and it's kind of annoying
Their screening tool on the UserZoom side (not Go) is clunky. Just let me select May, Must, or Should not for criteria rather than the weird interface design they have now.
Logic panel is a little confusing, sometimes I do a double-take, sometimes it's wonky and resets itself. It's just not as easy to use as it could be.
They haven't integrated UserZoom and UserZoom Go (formerly Validately)
It's expensive!
We signed up for a high sample size license with unlimited tests, but we're finding their panel doesn't fill as fast as their biggest competitor, UserTesting. We've struggled to fill n=100 sample tests with fairly general criteria.
A lot of their licenses only allow limited concurrent studies, whereas UserTesting had unlimited tests that you could launch at a time. It's slowed us down.
I'm actually trying to get a license for my current job at my current company (recently moved to a new company). I gave it this rating because I am about to go to our executive to ask that we purchase it! I know that there will be value because we are forecasting a high volume of research next year
Overall, it was fairly easy to use. Especially if you are familiar with this type of product. We were able to use it for testing pretty much right after we got it (same day) and didn't have many issues figuring out how to invite, test, and share which was great.
From my experience, the UserZoom team has really done a great job answering the limited questions we have given them thus far. I think the platform is popular enough that many of my questions have been answered by their help pages - or other online content with helpful tips and tricks. I think the community has done a nice job of providing end-user tutorials for those who are new to the platform.
Client selected it due to how they used it, pricing, and what it could do for them. It's about the same as these other tools but UsabilityHub let's you run multiple types of task in one test, and UserTesting still has a bigger panel I think
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.
Making informed decisions: repeat testing before launching the app/website to reduce errors in the future
Guarantee customers' satisfaction: ensure the errors are reduced to the minimum so that the purchase process is smooth and there will be no need to reach out to our customer support team
