Kana turns to India for code warriors

In what looks more and more like the way of the future, Kana, a midsize CRM vendor, has introduced three separate applications for its customer care suite within six months by turning to a company in India to write the code.

The latest application, Kana Response 8, is an automated e-mail response package deployed in customer-service solutions at Bank of America, Jet Blue, Priceline, and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota.  

Using natural-language understanding, Response 8 recognizes what the customer is asking in an e-mail and can respond with templated answers from its knowledge base.

At the same time, the e-mail is put into a live-agent queue. If the automated response resolves the customer query, then Response 8 goes back into that queue and pulls out the e-mail.

But the bigger news is that this and two other applications — IQ 8, the knowledge base; and Service 8, a multichannel contact-center management application — were developed at HCL Technologies in India at about one-fourth the cost of what Kana would have paid for developers in the United States.

"For every $1 we spend [in the United States], we spend 25 cents overseas. So by keeping the budget the same, we increase the number of [coders] available," said Ken Jochims, director of marketing at Kana.

The software is still designed at Kana, and Kana controls product management efforts.

Being able to turn to HCL or any outsource developer is greatly facilitated by the fact the Kana uses a standard J2EE platform.  

"It wouldn't be possible without a standard platform. That goes to the whole concept of componentization," Jochims said.