Manage Effectively with Knoa Software Experience Performance Manager

Knoa Software, a leading provider of end-user experience and performance management software, recently announced that the Enterprise Management Associates (EMA (News - Alert)), a leading industry analyst and consulting firm dedicated to the IT management market, named Knoa as the leader in its report, “An Adopter’s Guide to User Experience Management: How to Pick the Right Quality of Experience (QoE) Solution for You!”

 

In a report by DMG Consulting the company claims that two new classes of applications, customer experience analytics (CEA) and desktop analytics (DA) applications are delivering cost savings of 5 percent to 10 percent to organizations.

 

In light of Knoa Software’s recent announcement TMCnet had the change to speak with Lori Wizdo VP of Marketing at Knoa Software who, over the past 25 years, has helped launch several new technologies in emerging markets.

 

 

In a nutshell what Knoa is doing is we’re looking at one of the last things in the use of technology that has not been properly monitored or managed well and that is how do end-users interact with the technology that they are using to perform their jobs whether it be a CRM applications or any number of the applications that people can deploy in call centers. The two things that we’re trying to look at is first, what kind of experience is that piece of technology or application presenting to that end-user? Is the application slow and unresponsive, is the application of poor quality? Are end-users saying that there are always system errors and applications errors? Is an aspect of the experience received cumbersome or awkward or is it to get a certain aspect or certain process executed using the technology. So that is the information we capture about what kind of experience the application is presenting to the end user.

 

 

The software is call Knoa Experience Performance Manager (Knoa EPM) and it’s naturally a horizontal technology that can be deployed in any industry, and in fact we have a lot of customers, about 75 customers, that are in about 12 or 15 different industries. From consumer package goods, to pharmaceuticals, to energy and utilities they are all across the board. But some applications are more interesting then others in some solution areas.

 

 

In Salesforce Automation this technology is interesting because a lot of Salesforce Automation applications fail, the CRM applications fail because so much of the behavior is actually voluntary. Sure the sales rep might have to use the order entry function in order to book an order but all the contact management and all the things you can use to really gain good intelligence about his account and manage his opportunities and manage the pipeline, all the things that generate a lot of benefits for the company that’s deployed with the Salesforce Automation application all require the sales person to adopt the application and end use it. And if they don’t the company doesn’t get the benefits even though the company has made the investment. There are so many ways, because it’s a remote field force that the sales rep can say that they weren’t able to enter their forecast because they couldn’t connect to the system or they were getting bad response time and it was preventing them from making customer calls, so there are a lot of excuses that people can use.

 

So what the condition is, is that without a technology like Knoa people who are managing the application can’t tell whether that’s just noise or the application is just performing poorly, or the application isn’t available, so there is no way to sort the truth with the noise. Companies don’t know if they have an application problem that needs to be fixed or an adoption problem that should be handled through management and what we do is provide facts of what is really happening.

 

 

Our goal is to improve the way the end-user performs, we call is end-user performance, when using that application but the first thing you need to do is identify those barriers that are actually getting in the way. Once you’ve identified those barriers, you now look at what the end-user is actually doing. Have they adopted the application, are they using the right transactions for their role or for the kind of customer interaction that they’re trying to execute? Are they using the application well or they making a lot of user errors? And are they using the applications in a compliant manor, meaning are they using the applications in the way that they were designed? We’re capturing metrics on both sides of that equation, the experience received and the performance achieved and the kinds of metrics such as response times, system errors that are presented to the end-user, application errors that are presented to the end-user, user errors that the end-user is making and then what we call work flow, which is the information about how the end-user is stepping through the application from which you can derive the compliant process execution as well as adoption.

 

We deploy a piece of software, called a passive agent, to the desktop or laptop of each employee. Basically, there are two components that get deployed, one is an agent and the other is an instruction set which we call a template that says of all the things that we can capture, what are the data elements that are actually going to make a solution.

 

We have two different kinds of templates, some that go very deep into a particular application and they see every interaction and every transaction and some that go more horizontally across everything the end-user is doing on the desktop and it shows how much time someone is spending in Siebel and how much time are they spending in the Knowledge based and how much time are they spending on IM and just try to get a profile on how the end-users are using technology.