KANA Express, discontinued vs. Zoho Survey

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

Zoho Survey is everything you need in a survey platform. If you already have the Zoho One suite, it makes a complete replacement for Survey Monkey. I don't think anyone would need this app on a standalone basis, however, mainly because Zoho has a full suite of other apps you should be using on top of Survey.

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

• Zoho Survey comes with a simple UI and the builder offers many different question types. Its strength may be in simpler or more basic surveys, but it is definitely intuitive enough to design a very in-depth survey. Publishing surveys is again a straightforward process and is easy to do.
• The piping and logic features provide a better user experience for survey respondents, and are easy to configure within Zoho Survey. New features are always being added to Survey and the resources pages offer great detailed info on how to use the features of Zoho Survey.
• The integration with other Zoho apps (Zoho CRM, Zoho Analytics, etc.) is a real strength. Zoho has ingeniously created an entire "operating system" for business that integrates all their apps so perfectly. For example, if you send a project survey to a contact you can view their response contextually within the CRM system. So basically, project managers can stay in the CRM and see all Zoho Survey responses from their customers.
• Survey scoring is a great feature as well!

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

• I honestly can't think of anything wrong with it (on our end). It does what it needs, and I've never had any issues retrieving surveys received.

Incentivized

Zoho Survey is really easy to use. We've used Doodle and Survey Monkey in the past, and Zoho Social is just as easy, if not easier to use.

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Zoho's support is always quick to respond and troubleshoot any issues

Incentivized

We went with Zoho Survey largely because we use other Zoho products. I did try SurveyMonkey and actually found it a little overwhelming in terms of how much customization you could do with it. Once back with Zoho Survey, having used other Zoho products, I was more comfortable with the way it worked (although Zoho's UI does have its quirks to get used to). Recommended for Zoho Users especially.

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

• The results obtained have been great in relation to the saving of time and money that we have saved.
• It's so simple to use, has allowed everyone in the organization to use it, which is great for the contribution that each partner offers.

Incentivized