Kana Software has released its latest version of LAGAN Enterprise customer service suite, focused on helping government agencies offer citizens “digital first” communication channels, enabling Web self-service, social, and mobile capabilities.
Kana believes that government entities have lagged far behind their commercial brethren in making online interactions with the public easy and accessible. As an example, Kana points to the recent debacle involving the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Web site.
“If you’re going to put something on the Web, it has to be able to handle load to work and capacity to work,” says David Moody, head of worldwide product strategy for Kana. “It seems to us that those things were not considered carefully enough with [the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Web site]. Web sites have to handle enormous volumes of traffic, which our software does right out of the box.”
Accord to a Kana survey, government adoption of online self-service technology is on the upswing; 40 percent of respondents said that they hope to have 25 to 49 percent of their services accessible using a self-service channel, such as mobile, Web, or kiosk, within the next 12 to 18 months.
“We’ve had social media for some time through an earlier acquisition, and we’ve been methodically adding it to our customer service products,” Moody says. “This release of Kana LAGAN Enterprise fully integrates social listen and response functionality within this product suite for the public sector.”
Moody says that one benefit of social media with Kana LAGAN Enterprise is early identification of customer or citizen concerns before they turn into larger issues. Another positive is that social media supports two-way social communication, allowing government agencies to provide quick options to resolve issues.
Additional new LAGAN Enterprise capabilities include a secure Web self-service portal, which offers access to customer data and transactions so that agencies can increase the availability of online services with best practice security and privacy protocols. Another feature provides closed loop reporting that keeps customers advised of developments every step of the way through the entire customer journey, improving transparency and lowering what Kana calls "avoidable contact," which can trigger costs for agencies. Finally, Kana touts deployment cost savings with the new tools, due to lower maintenance.
The rollout comes on the heels of last week’s news of Kana’s acquisition by Verint for $514 million, which is expected to close in April.
“Kana will operate as a division of Verint,” adds Ryan Zuk, senior manager, media and analyst relations at Verint. “The products of each company are highly complementary and there’s very little overlap, so this will give us further strengths in the area of analytics.”