As companies continue to pressure their customer service departments to cut costs and as customers become more and more comfortable with the Internet and taking care of routine problems themselves, self-service applications are providing a solution.

This year's winner in the online self-service category is Knova Self-Service 6.5. The application was singled out by our judges for its solid platform, its breadth and depth and its "very cool core technology" for search and analytics.

Knova offers resolution wizards that guide end users through a specific workflow and can target repeatable, high cost issues, as well as a guided natural language search feature. A personalized portal for proactive service helps avoid customer problems before they happen. Additionally, it provides a knowledge capture workflow tool, integration with CRM incident workflow and root cause analytics.

Customers include Novell, McAfee and Merrill Lynch.

Knova self-service starts at $50,000 and scales with additional central processing units.

Editors of SearchCRM.com