Talisma has upgraded its namesake software for the
increasingly competitive customer relationship management
(CRM) market.
"Co-browsing" capabilities, user-defined interface customisation
features and the ability to handle a greater number of concurrent
users have been added, according to company officials in New York
this week at CeBIT America.
Talisma Customer Interaction Suite 6.0, launched at the show
this week, consists of modules including chat, analytics, email
response, phone, self-service and campaign.
Although big software companies have jumped into the CRM market
over the past few years, Talisma tends to be used to augment,
rather than compete with products from major enterprise resource
planning (ERP) companies, such as Oracle and SAP.
"They can tell you when a customer ordered a book, but can they
tell you how many times, or when, a customer called you or mailed
you or talked with a service representative, and bring all that
information together?" said Daniel Sears, Talisma's director of
product management and alliances.
Talisma competes more directly with smaller CRM players such as
RightNow Technologies, Sears said, but he added that Siebel Systems
also goes after some of the same accounts.
Talisma is designed to let call centres, for example, interact
with customers via the web, over the phone, or through e-mail.
Talisma also offers a software development kit with a library of
open application programming interfaces to allow transaction data
to be transferred from ERP programmes.
The Talisma interface can also be customised so that, for
example, relevant functions of ERP applications can be controlled
from within the Talisma interface. The customisation can be done
via point-and-click software wizards by non-technical staff, he
said.
Marc Ferranti writes for IDG News
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