Knoa® Software, the leading provider of end-user experience and performance management (EPM) software, today announced a partnership with Serene Corporation, a recognized expert in Siebel CRM implementations and global IT consulting firm. The newly established alliance enables customers to leverage Knoa’s end-user experience technology and metrics and Serene’s Siebel-specific expertise and consulting services to improve success rates, increase return on investment (ROI), and lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) of CRM deployments — whether in a call center, operating service processes, or supporting a field sales force.

Customer-facing sales and service organizations must continually enhance operational performance to drive revenues and improve customer experience and satisfaction. Together, Serene and Knoa provide expertise, through proven methodologies, services, and tools, and intelligence, with comprehensive data about the end-user experience, to identify systems issues and pinpoint targets for improving end-user performance on an ongoing basis.

“CRM professionals cannot afford failed technology deployment projects, particularly in tough economic times when business survival may be at stake,” wrote Bill Band, vice president and principal analyst, Forrester, Inc. in the February 2009 report titled “How To Risk-Proof Your CRM Deployment Strategy.”

The report continues, “To pinpoint the real-world pitfalls that can trip up CRM initiatives, Forrester surveyed business and IT leaders at 133 organizations. The executives were asked, 'What were the major challenges in successfully implementing [CRM vendor solution] in your environment?' The companies we studied are all well-experienced with CRM initiatives; they typically had 30 months of deployment experience under their belts with a wide range of leading enterprise and midmarket CRM suite solutions. There are plenty of risks to worry about. In fact, respondents reported more than 200 individual problems with their CRM projects, encompassing 27 risk areas. These perils form the basis of Forrester's CRM project risk evaluation. Thirty-three percent of the problems reported were related to technology, 27% to business processes, 22% to people, and 18% to CRM strategy and deployment.”

As acknowledged leaders in their respective disciplines, Knoa and Serene together offer complementary strengths, including a strong track record of successful CRM implementations with expertise in enterprise application performance tuning and comprehensive end-user experience, business process analysis, and performance metrics.

The Knoa-Serene alliance delivers business value in three ways:

Discovery: End-User Issue Identification

Most CRM initiatives are hampered from inception by insufficient visibility into the real impact of the end-user experience on performance. When bottlenecks are found with Knoa EPM, Serene’s expert consultants use their proprietary Siebel Performance Intelligence (SPI) Toolkit to identify the root cause of the performance issues and provide recommendations for resolution.

Measurement: End-User Experience Monitoring

After remediation has been implemented, customers can run Knoa benchmark reports to highlight improvements in user proficiency, effectiveness, and compliance.

Sustainability: End-User Performance Management

Knoa EPM is designed to provide continuous monitoring, analysis, and aggregation of information to deliver actionable insight to improve process compliance, training requirements, adoption issues, and a number of other management dimensions. This information is used to support ongoing and sustained improvement of both the experience the end-user has with the application and the performance the end-user achieves working with the application.

Knoa and Serene together provide substantial benefits to customers:

• Demonstrable savings and ROI
• Optimized performance and quality of CRM solutions
• Higher levels of user adoption
• Identification of impediments to efficient and effective use of CRM solutions
• Identifiable opportunities for process improvement
• Managed process compliance issues
• Reduced costs for on-boarding new employees and training
• Reduced cost of managing and supporting end-users of CRM applications
• Mitigated risk of cost overruns and business disruption during software “go-live” and upgrades.

“Serene’s proven business and technical expertise helps companies rapidly develop and implement a clear CRM strategy,” said Ajit Kumbhare, co-founder and managing partner of Serene Corporation. “Until recently, there was no effective way to systematically capture meaningful data on the behaviors that drive service efficiency and productivity. With Knoa’s end-user monitoring solution and end-user metrics combined with our Siebel Performance Intelligence Toolkit, both companies can ensure that clients maximize the business value of their CRM deployments, and in turn increase customer satisfaction and revenues.”

“Knoa’s end-user monitoring solutions consistently produce a series of quick-wins simply by illuminating the system/end-user interaction that is invisible to most application performance management tools,” said Lori Wizdo, vice president, Knoa Software. “But, sustained and transformational improvement is the end-game and Knoa is impressed with the outstanding results Serene’s Siebel Performance Intelligence Toolkit has helped its customers achieve. Serene’s proven methods and Knoa’s comprehensive end-user metrics are a powerful combination.”

About Serene Corporation

Serene Corporation is a leading systems integration company and consulting firm that specializes in the implementation of business applications, including CRM, MDM, EAI, BI, and SaaS. Serene serves a wide range of clients across industries such as biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, communications, financial services, high technology, media, real estate, and residential construction. With global clients and worldwide operations, Serene is dedicated to the delivery of integrated IT solutions to achieve outstanding business success. For more information, please visit www.serenecorporation.com.

About Knoa

Knoa Software is leading the performance management industry with end-user experience management solutions that reach beyond infrastructure and application performance to monitor, measure and manage how end-users are utilizing corporate software applications to optimize business process execution. Knoa customers not only know if core enterprise applications are delivering an acceptable user experience, but also, if application users are executing key processes effectively and efficiently — the key to achieving business value and ROI. Knoa was recently selected as a Gartner “Cool Vendor,” for its capabilities in end-user experience and performance management and was listed as a Leader in the “Forrester Wave: Passive Agent End-user Experience Monitoring.” Knoa is headquartered in New York, NY. For more information about Knoa, please visit www.knoa.com.

Note: Knoa is a registered trademark of Knoa Software, and Serene is a registered trademark of Serene Corporation. All other company and product names contained herein are the marks of their respective holders.