If you haven’t already heard the news, KANA has just completed its acquisition of leading contact center company, Ciboodle. It’s an important step in the continued build-out of KANA’s Customer Experience Management solution and a decision I’m excited about for KANA as a company, and on behalf of Ciboodle’s and KANA’s joint customers.

Like KANA, here is a company truly dedicated to its vision of improving customer experience—of helping its customers deliver on-point customer experiences and build lasting relationships.

In my job as VP of product marketing at KANA, and my years here before that as VP of product engineering, I’ve always admired that fact that we at KANA really listen to our customers. At KANA we’re acutely mindful of how our customers use technology to do the work of providing customer service, of resolving customer issues, and of connecting with their customers. What are our customers’ pain points, and how do these pains affect the customer experience they deliver? The answers help direct how we build our products. And I like to think it’s the reason our products resonate so well with our customers.

Ciboodle too enjoys a strong brand name and an appreciative customer base thanks in part to a product line that captures the needs of service organizations in so many critical ways, so well. They have built a strong reputation providing contact center, agent desktop, business process management, and case management solutions and have been featured in Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Service Contact Centers for six consecutive years.

KANA has built a reputation providing email response management, knowledge management, web self-service and chat, and more recently social listening. Together, we’ll be even more effective in closing the customer experience gap. The distance between the experience businesses want to deliver and the one they often do continues to widen as a result of empowered customers carrying all the world’s information in their pocket and wearing their heart on their sleeve (as expressed in 140 characters). KANA and Ciboodle turn the monumental developments in consumer habits into an advantage for businesses—enabling them to be ever more responsive to customers in ever more channels and to provide a connected and consistent presence across them.

Personally, I am most excited about the cultural synergy, aka DNA, that the combination brings to the market. Both KANA and Ciboodle have developed a strong DNA in customer service, over 15 and 25 years respectively, by learning from and working closely with customers. As we all know, DNA is hard to create or replicate and I would venture to say that KANA’s DNA in customer service is now unmatched in the competitive vendor landscape. The best thought leaders in customer service now work at KANA and worlds leading customer-focused brands are now KANA customers. The union of KANA and Ciboodle creates a technology portfolio unparalleled in depth and vision and the only solution that combines deep contact center DNA with web customer service expertise unlike other vendors focused on niches like Knowledge, eService, call center Infrastructure, Social or broad CRM.

It’s an exciting time to work in customer service software at KANA—not least of which thanks to KANA’s newest acquisition.

Please join me in welcoming Ciboodle aboard!