By Chris Bucholtz

There’s been a push recently – especially in marketing automation – toward making systems easier to use. First came things like campaign management, so the ordinary marketer could use the system without the need for a trained “expert” to translate ideas into actions. Lately, we’ve been seeing approaches that help make process creation easier, so that things like lead routing can be defined easily and quickly and allow managers to react in real time to changing conditions.

Nothing in the “CRM-isphere” exists in isolation, so it’s not a big surprise to see ideas like these hop and skip across to the service side of thing. KANA Software’s KANA 10, a service platform aimed at large enterprises which debuted yesterday, is a good example of just this – it’s a solution that confers that ability to manage processes on the fly to the service side of the CRM equation.

“We’ve adopted the idea of ‘service experience management,’” says Vikas Nehru, KANA’s vice president of marketing. “We want to deliver a good service experience for the customer, and at the same time allow contact center managers to take control of the service experience.”

What does that entail? The new version is a Web services-based solution that leverages IBM’s service-oriented architecture (SOA) portfolio and KANA’s own experience with knowledge management and adds what KANA calls “experience flow functionality.” That functionality is the key to the solution; it provides a drag-and-drop interface for creating service processes, allowing managers to understand what customers need most often and adapt processes quickly to meet those needs.

“The service process – or experience flows – can now be built by service experts, not by IT,” says Nehru. “The business user can make the changes, add tab or delete tabs, and so on. Those changes can be made in minutes, not months.”

The process also allows managers to model the effects of changes to the processes before taking them live so they can “understand the value derived from each process,” Nehru says. That also ought to help them spot unintended problems that might be created by changes before they’re unleashed upon the customers.

The applications’ web services architecture allows existing technology and resources to be linked into a single application, providing a unified view of all pertinent customer information. “We really think we are bridging the gap between business and IT this way,” says Nehru.

This application is another step in the trend of offloading the responsibility for implementing process changes from IT and giving it back to the people who determine, execute and evaluate those processes. No longer do you have to suffer through a bad set of service processes while waiting for IT to get to your project, and more importantly, no longer will customers have to suffer because of your company’s internal inefficiencies in process management. And why should they? Those inefficiencies aren’t their fault.