A friend of mine recently found himself in the middle of a terrible customer service experience. He’s a systems engineer and two of the servers he was supporting had failed with the same error. The production system was down, and the client was looking for a quick resolution. He immediately called the customer support line for the product to open a case. In order to enter the case details, the agent asked a series of questions, one of which was the serial number of the application. Since the issue spanned across two servers with two serial numbers, the agent informed my friend that he would have to open two separate tickets. My friend re-iterated that both systems were experiencing the same issue, but the agent insisted that this was the way the process needed to be managed. After taking down all the required information, the agent ended the call, and informed my friend he would be receiving a callback shortly.

A few hours later, and agent called him back to report progress on the case. The agent informed my friend that he had been assigned to work a particular case number, and read out the details of the case to confirm. The case in fact listed all of the information my friend had provided for one of the applications. He confirmed that this was his case, but stated for a third time that this case was only half of his problem, and that a second server was experiencing the same issue. The agent responded that he had only been assigned this single case to work, so he had no information on the other one. When asked if the two cases could be linked, there were only vague replies. This process continued, with my friend having to deal with two separate agents in two separate processes, trying to find the root cause for a single problem. With each subsequent call, my friend was more and more exasperated. Each time, he tried without success to link these two applications under a single issue, and each time the agent responded that he was only aware of the one case to which he had been assigned.

“I’m trying to make this easier for you!” I heard him shout into the phone after about the tenth call of the day.

In the end, the issue required a new part to be installed, which meant that a service technician from the company needed to come onsite for the repair. I’m sure you can guess how this story ends. Two separate service technicians were dispatched to drive to the same facility to send the same part to fix the same issue for two servers sitting directly next to each other in a data center.

Because this company’s case management system was not flexible enough to even allow the minor change of including two serial numbers under a single case, the company’s costs were doubled, case resolution time was extended, and my friend’s customer satisfaction was severely lowered. This call is merely one example. Every organization is unique, and each requires a unique way to provide service experience. An adaptive case management system allows a company to configure what a case looks like, how processes should be followed, and how to design the optimal user interface. KANA’s Service Experience Management platform allows business owners to configure a unique experience for their customer service environment to adapt to the organization’s unique needs.

Kelly Koelliker is Product Marketing Manager, KANA

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