Jointly developed with BearingPoint, Inc. (NYSE:BE), one of the world's largest business consulting and systems integration firms, KANA's Credit Card applications allow companies to optimise service delivery and decrease overall operational costs.

Credit card companies today are faced with increasingly complex and time-consuming customer inquiries both in call centres and via the web. Among other things, this can be attributed to increasingly complex product and service offerings, additional channels, a more complex regulatory environment and highly informed customers. As a result, card companies and their agents must be armed with the knowledge and industry leading practices needed to provide consistent and quick resolution to all customer inquiries, whether through a call centre or Web-based self-service. In order to meet this need, KANA and BearingPoint teamed to develop Agent IQ and Customer IQ for Credit Cards. The solutions provide automated self-service options for service representatives and customers, helping improve the efficiency and effectiveness of call centre agents and deflect costly service calls by providing robust customer self-service.

"These solutions respond to the credit card industry's need for service resolution management applications that are easily integrated with existing infrastructures, enabling these companies to realise an immediate return on their investment," said Brian Kelly, executive vice president of marketing and products at KANA. "Consumer credit card companies now have scalable applications that provide fast, adaptive responsiveness to market and business changes, allowing these companies to provide a superior customer experience as a market differentiation. Additionally, these companies can reduce the overall cost of providing service by reducing call handling times and increasing the adoption of low-cost self-service."

"The KANA Credit Card solutions can help deliver high-impact value for service resolution management and incorporate thought and industry experience in that market," said Christopher Formant, BearingPoint's Executive Vice President, Financial Services. "With these new solutions, card companies can now enhance their ability to continually adapt to the complex demands of a dynamic credit industry, while improving agent efficiency, customer support, reducing costs, and increasing resolution accuracy."

The IQ for Credit Cards applications are part of KANA's Service Resolution Management approach to providing customised solutions that address the specific pain points of key vertical markets and strengthen KANA's already existing financial services, retail banking and branch banking applications. These solutions help optimise service by improving first contact resolution rates, enabling more efficient lead generation and product matching and automating customer processes.

The solutions help to decrease operational costs by providing efficient lower-cost interaction channels. Both solutions build on the industry experience of BearingPoint and KANA to incorporate leading business practices through a flexible workflow and business rules while also leveraging internal and external knowledge bases to enable consistent resolutions of inquiries.

Features of the solutions include:

• Knowledge repository structure designed to help agents and customers with procedures, policies, fees, account maintenance, disputes and other common assistance topics;
• Automated guidance for answering card-related issues resulting in faster turn-around;
• Guided workflow, scripting and decision tree technology;
• Integrated search and retrieval methods, including guided agent scripts, clarifying questions and natural language query that automatically provide assistance throughout a transaction and reduce agent training time;
• Easy to use online service and support resolution interface using a leading practices approach to increasing self-service adoption;
• Integration with existing credit card Web platforms and other credit card industry solutions.

In a recent Forrester report titled, "How to Right-Channel Credit Card Customers," January 2004, Catherine Graeber, vice president, Financial Services, found that credit card providers are right-channeling customers to the Web, i.e. directing them to the Web self-service channel. However, just 22% of online cardholders are actually accessing their account online regularly. The report goes on to state that the most successful credit card firms will involve its branches and call centre to help move customers online.