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Rukmini Priyadarshini

Talisma says its software can make a difference in a call centre setting.

Dan Vetras

CUSTOMER relationship management (CRM) software helps companies enrich interaction with their customers, and, in turn, boost their own profits.

eWorld sounded out Talisma Corp, a company active in the CRM space. Talisma's CRM suite is a contact centre management solution that lets customers choose how to handle interactions — e-mail, chat, and webform inquiries. The company expects revenues of $25 million in 2005, up from the $18 million it made last year. It has over 350 customers in 28 countries across segments that include higher education, technology, retail/consumer goods, financial services and healthcare. It expects to come out with Version 7.0 during the year and to integrate the offerings of its acquisition eAssist with its products by 2006.

Dan Vetras, CEO, Talisma, tells eWorld "Our CRM suite is so configurable that we do not need to do much customisation. With inputs from our market research, we can deliver industry-specific nomenclature to multiple markets. At the back-end we have written interfaces for legacy systems including Siebel, Oracle, Onyx etc," he says.

For instance, one of the areas the company targets is higher education. It helps universities and other academic institutions to home in on students and applicants to send their marketing material to. This is made possible because it integrates student test results and other relevant information into the information systems of the institutes. It helps universities looking to provide their students with free anonymous counselling sessions online. "We enable senior students who provide the online counselling to get academic credits that are automatically recorded in their performance report," he says.

"Some applications we have developed enable call centres and BPO customers to function better at lower costs," says Vetras.

Here's an instance: A call centre agent may be dealing with a customer by e-mail or chat. But when she is faced with an escalation - requiring direct voice interaction - there is no longer any need for her to ask her customer to call back on a phone line.

A pop-up phone icon on the agent's screen, when clicked, will initiate a VOIP phone call to the customer's number so that the escalation can be dealt with immediately. This way, the call centre agent is catering to a human preference for voice at a much lower cost than otherwise.

Further, this is being done immediately and on the same communication channel at the same time that every detail of customer relationship — from e-mail to live Web chat and initial lead to purchases and complaints — is accessible for reference.

Vetras says the company sells its solutions to service providers in the North American healthcare market. Most of these require potential customers to fill out an online form. When a potential customer gets stuck while filling an online form, there is a chance to proactively initiate a chat session to enable completing the form through co-browsing features. This improves the probability of sales by enabling users to reach the end of the Web-form or query.

Corporations want to leverage the Internet and provide portals but want to reduce support costs at the same time. These features make sense to customers and the call centre/BPO industry across the world, especially in India. "We have bagged customers such as Daksh eServices, Aviva, Baazee, Prudential ICICI, Citibank and Rediff in India," he says.

Growth plans

Talisma has about 150 people in India, 75 in the US and 12 in Europe. "We plan to add sales and professional services resources across the world and may consider a couple of acquisitions in 2005 to round out the technology play in our suite," says Vetras.

"In India, we will add enough people to support the development of current and new products but our focus will be primarily on sales resources in the markets."

Talisma's "CoSource Partner Program allows BPOs to deliver enhanced customer services that leverage multiple channels of customer communication including e-mail, chat, phone, and Web self-service," he says.

priya@thehindu.co.in

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