CRM Tool Academy: Kana Enhances Its Social CRM Tool for 'Wisdom of Crowds.'

Kana Software says the social CRM capabilities in their service experience management platform, Kana 10, have been "enhanced."

To punch up the "collective intelligence capabilities" of the product, what agents use when navigating, cross-selling and up-selling, the product integrates Baynote's Collective Intelligence Platform to swoop down with predictive analytics for on-site customers.

Great. So how's that "social" CRM enhancement, exactly? Oh yeah -- the Kanians say it'll also enhance search results ranking "based on common search patterns and build communities of customers with similar interests and orientations." Social CRM is based on the idea that it's possible to employ the "wisdom of crowds" to improve service delivery. As people who've been to hockey games know (bada-bing!).

Social CRM is cool, lots of good uses for that, lot of success being reported, but "customer communities?" We had no idea what the heck those are, so we Googled and found, unsurprisingly, that Amazon did -- a place where you can "share your experiences and enthusiasm for your favorite topics with millions of other Amazon.com customers."

Sounds... like something companies would be a lot more excited about than customers, frankly: I just want to buy the Weed Whacker, not join a discussion group -- "Got some pretty thick brush there in Wisconsin, do you? Huh."

But then a Hahvahd study found that for eBay Germany, "those that participated in community became much more active participants, representing about 55 percent more activity and several million dollars of new profit."

It didn't specify if the "new" business was as a result of the community, or just from members of the community who probably qualify as the more active users anyway, and the link was broken, but hey, there you go -- take Harvard's word for it, I guess. I'm not 100 percent sold on "customer community," but what do I know?