Kana Update Focuses on Translation, Compliance

Kana has updated its knowledge management and customer service suite, IQ 9.1, with new workflow capabilities that give users more control over content translation. Other upgrades provide more precise ways to document changes to the knowledgebase for compliance purposes.

“We had a lot of customers and prospects asking for these features,” CTO Charles Isaacs told CRM Buyer.

Lost in Translation

The translation workflow upgrades essentially formalize what is usually an ad hoc process at many multinational companies: For example, when an employee edits content — say, an internal document or corporate Web site FAQ — in the French language knowledgebase, the system notifies designated employees in Germany, Japan and the United States that similar content must be translated and updated in their own editions.

The workflow automatically marks the content for translation and then helps synchronize the translation efforts, Isaacs said.

What the application does not do is actually translate the material. That must be handled internally or through external resources such as machine translation or translation services, he added.

“We don’t provide that engine — we treat it as a commodity,” he said. Kana IQ, however, does have an open template on the front end that allows for a translation engine or application to be integrated into the system.

Keeping Track of Communications

A new audit feature in Kana IQ allows companies to better track the communications sent internally or externally, even after a certain document or workflow has been changed.

For instance, a customer might receive an automated response from a service rep about a problem with a recent purchase. Even though changes might later be incorporated into the stock response, the system keeps track of what information was sent, and when.

This type of tracking is especially useful when dealing with product recalls or rebate programs, for example. It is very important to companies that are subject to multiple regulations, either across industry or different jurisdictions, according to Isaacs.

Companies regulated by Sarbanes-Oxley, for example, may need to tell auditors what their response was to an emerging problem at a particular period of time. Kana IQ highlights any changes and preserves the object history as documentation in case of litigation or regulatory review.

Last month, Kana updated Response, its e-mail response management application, and Response Live, its live chat and Web collaboration module, to provide better integration across customer touch points, along with additional functionality that allows desktop agents to answer customer questions faster.