Kana Software Acquires Social Listing Company Overtone’s,Inc.

Sunnyvale, California and San Francisco, California , April 5, 2011. KANA® Software, Inc., a world leader in software solutions for Service Experience Management (SEM), has completed its acquisition of Overtone®, Inc., a leading provider of social media and customer listening platforms for large, brand name companies. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Overtone generates actionable insights from massive amounts of social media and customer feedback. The company’s cloud-based solution goes well beyond social media monitoring, enabling Social Listening. By understanding and analyzing customer sentiment, emerging issues, and topic trends, Social Listening extends KANA’s multi-channel customer service platform into the world of Twitter, Facebook and communities.

The combination creates the world’s first enterprise-class Service Experience Management solution. Enterprises will now be able to rapidly design and orchestrate customer service and take appropriate actions while listening to social media channels. In addition, customer service agents will now have a real 360-degree view of customers across all communication channels including popular social networks, email, web feedback forms, chat, surveys, and online communities. “This acquisition is a vital step in fulfilling our vision for the next-generation of customer service, creating the first solution that enables large enterprises to design, orchestrate and listen to service experiences across all channels, including social,” commented KANA’s CEO Mark Duffell. “We found only Overtone to have the technology, talent and reputation to meet the growing needs of our market for actionable insights. I am delighted to welcome Overtone employees, customers and partners to the KANA family.”

Overtone, Inc. Background

Overtone was the first company to develop and market a listening system in the Cloud able to collect, analyze, and report on the voice of the customer wherever it was expressed. Overtone customers include Fortune 500 companies in retail, financial services, consumer products, travel, internet media, and telecommunication industries. Overtone powers strategic insights and intelligent action with:

1. Proprietary Text Analytics Engine – Automates the reading and analysis of text to determine sentiment, topics, and trends from consumer generated comments. Able to automatically distinguish multiple topics in a single post along with misspellings, acronyms and grammatical nuances.

2. Multiple Channel Capabilities - Monitor, understand and analyze information from all customer interaction channels including online communities, text messages, tweets, social networks, open-ended survey responses, online chat, email, and web feedback forms.

3. Dashboard to Root-Cause Analysis - Customers view configurable, interactive dashboards to see feedback across channels with the ability to drill-down to investigate specific topics, authors, location, customer attributes, and to determine root-cause of changes and discrepancies. Analysts are able to drill-down to a particular issue and forward that specific feedback to a workflow for response or handling.

4. Enterprise Reporting & Integration- Numerous out-of-the-box reports across channels, including top issues and praise, emerging alerts, and business unit specific analytics. Web Services APIs and Widgets enable integration of charts, reports, and insights into a unifiedcustomer service dashboard or portal.

“Industry leading companies have sought to understand the voice of their customers across all interaction channels including social media,” said Craig Brennan, CEO of Overtone. “Overtone has enabled some of the world’s top companies to understand the sentiment and meaning of online chatter about their company. Instead of simply monitoring traffic on Facebook and Twitter, Overtone delivers the ability to truly listen to customer concerns and react to their needs. The combination of KANA and Overtone will undeniably create the market’s best solution for actionable social and customer insights.”

Beyond integrating Overtone’s capabilities into the SEM platform to create actionable insight, KANA will continue to support new and existing Overtone customers, as well as develop and market the Overtone listening software solutions. Overtone was a private company backed by venture firms Dolphin Equity Partners, ABS Ventures, and Whelan Capital Management. More information can be found at www.overtone.com and www.kana.com.

KANA makes every customer experience a good experience. As the leader in Service Experience Management (SEM), KANA gives managers total control over the customer service process, so they can take care of their brand while taking care of customers. By unifying and adapting customer journeys across the contact center, web site and social community, KANA's solutions have reduced handling time, increased resolution rates and improved Net Promoter Score (NPS) at more than 600 enterprises, including half of the Global 100 and more than 200 government agencies. KANA is based in Silicon Valley and has offices worldwide.

NOTE: KANA, Overtone, and Openmic are registered trademarks of KANA Software, Inc. All other
company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Katie Sieck
KANA Software
Cell Phone: 202-716-8167
KANA, 840 W California Avenue, Suite 100, Sunnyvale, CA 94086
E-mail: kanasem@kana.com

This release was published on openPR.