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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Zoho CRM Plus
Score 8.1 out of 10
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Zoho Corporation offers Zoho CRM Plus, a customer experience management platform that features a virtual AI assistant, process automation and business rules engine, and customer behavior analytics.
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.
Starting with campaigns, once we send the campaign out, prospects who open it are moved into the sales funnel; the sales team then calls or emails the prospect. Our VOIP works in conjunction with Zoho CRM Plus, so phone calls are logged into the contact. And generates another call, letter, or appointment with the client on the Zoho calendar. Emails are sent through Gmail since Zoho CRM Plus does not work with Gmail. The client's email must be copied and pasted into Gmail. (responses are tracked in the Zoho CRM Plus). Once the sales team meets with the client and starts the process, it turns into an "opportunity" where all stages in the sale are tracked. We mail merge the contact info to the correct letter template, then download it into "Word," where the letter is proofed and corrected as necessary (Zoho merge does not allow you to work in "Word" 2019). When finalized, it is then uploaded back into Zoho CRM Plus under the Opportunity. The sale then continues through the process, and once signed off on, all the details of the job are logged into the Zoho CRM Plus. When the job is completed and closed out, Zoho CRM Plus automatically sends the client a thank you email. The client will then can biannual automatic emails reminding them to set up their bi-annual inspection.
Zoho CRM Plus is very good at automating many functional areas of our company including: sales, marketing, operations, and engineering. It is functionally rich, and matches the functionality we used to have with Salesforce.com, but at a much more reasonable cost.
Zoho CRM Plus is easily "configured" to match our business processes. The ability to configure the user interface is very good, and the "BluePrint", custom functions, and reporting allow us to automate our unique operational needs.
The buying process for Zoho CRM is extremely friendly. You can switch between software types from basic CRM to Zoho CRM +. You also can pay monthly, or annually, and don't have to purchase months before your renewal dates and get pestered by sales people.
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.
Managing attachments. Limited space for each user and you can’t easily delete attachments in bulk so if you reach your limit it becomes expensive to buy more space or labor-intensive to find and delete attachments manually.
You can’t filter accounts by their related module fields. For example, in list view, filter all accounts with more than one contact.
I personally started off as a CRM novice. But in a matter of 2 months, I was writing my own custom workflows, playing with modules and fields, and training my sales and operations teams to manage leads and accounts. Simply put, the system is intuitive after a brief introduction. The level of customization is staggering until you change your mindset. Zoho CRM Plus excels where you're able to attack your goals as problems already solved in the platform — you just need to locate the feature to make what you want to happen... happen! I equate it to the Adobe Creative Suite. You don't pick the fun filter before you lay out what exactly you want to draw. With that mindset intact, you can dial in the system to meet your and your team's needs based on your proposed SOLUTIONS, not just leaning heavily into a single feature to "force" some ROI.
Every account representative I have worked with has been extremely helpful and nice. You can tell the account reps and support staff truly care about the product and want to provide you with the resources that you need. The response time is also fast for support inquiries and that has been a massive help for us.
I utilize HubSpot to gather data based on IP addresses from customers who visit our website. I do not use Zoho CRM for forms since the customization is clunky to design. HubSpot collects account data from the form and that helps me evaluate to sales potential of that account. Then I use Zapier to Zap the info into Zoho. Zoho CRM then is used to reach back out to the customer and begin tracking interactions
I would recommend that module wise update feature be opened up, for free to an additional 50-75% of paid users. These users can be restricted to work on a single module to update information only where they do not cross over multiple modules
I already discussed this prior with the Enterprise Support. But them aside, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Zoho is committed to connecting their userbase together. Within a month or two of using the product, we were told about Zoho User Groups. We had one right in my backyard (Chicago). I was able to both attend a meeting (pre-covid), and then stay in touch in an integrated Cliq channel. I always have power-users at my fingertips to ask quick questions. That Zoho makes it a point to keep these connections, and empower them... makes my life easier when inevitable "wants" pop up.
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.
The ROI is significantly positive due to the comprehensive set of modules available.
Positive: My clients have better Dashboard data developed through Zoho Analytics than they do even though they use Salesforce. Also, Zoho CRM Plus can integrate with Salesforce or other system either through their own integrations or from Zapier.
Campaigns allows me to target specific prospects via HTML emails, and complete tracking. This is a complement to the more shotgun approach of social media,
