Capturing CRM

FOR MANY COMPANIES, reaching sales objectives requires carefully coordinating myriad activities across different departments, such as sales, marketing, and customer service. Triggers for these activities are customer phone calls, e-mail messages, and Web interactions that flow randomly inside the company and need to be properly and expediently addressed to avoid disappointing customers or missing business opportunities.

A CRM solution that can capture exchanges with your customers and automatically integrate them with daily business activities can save administrative costs, improve customer satisfaction, and ultimately boost revenues.

Talisma recently released a new version of its CRM Suite that improves on a solid Windows-based package for sales, marketing, and customer support with a handful of new features and technical enhancements, including more sophisticated analytic reports, redesigned UI for chat, support for multiple locales, the capability of running on clustered databases and, interestingly, the adoption of the Microsoft .Net platform, although Talisma has not shared its plans to adopt Web services at this time.

Talisma is appealing because it offers a high-end CRM solution, competitive with the likes of Siebel, Pivotal, and E.piphany, in a well-integrated suite that promises shorter deployment times and lower operating costs.

Talisma offers its CRM Suite as a software package or as a hosted service via the Internet. We reviewed the hosted version of the suite, accessing via the Internet in a typical outsourcing scenario.

Probably the most questionable aspect of Talisma is its user interface or, rather, the variety of GUIs, including a fat, Windows-based client, a browser client for regular users, a browser client for administrators, and an offline client based on Microsoft Outlook.

Complicating matters further, the user thin client currently gives access only to a limited set of Talisma features; to get full functionality, remote users need to access the fat client on the Talisma server using Citrix ICA (Independent Computing Architecture) or Windows Terminal Services connectivity. According to the company, the Web client will provide full functionality in future releases.

As an additional disappointment, the users’ browser-based client was still in beta at the time of the review. We tested it anyway, noting a look and feel similar to the fat client, but with a more pleasant screen layout, then moved to our fat client for our test.

The Talisma GUI offers a no-frills, two-pane interface, one showing the most frequently accessed data and the second displaying the remaining data for each business object, such as account, contact, opportunity, or orders. By dragging and dropping between the two panes, users can adjust the GUI to their preference and then hide the second pane.

A horizontal bar at the bottom of the screen offers quick pointers to other related screens; users can select which business object to open, such as an account, from the menu bar and quickly access pertinent contact, opportunity, or order data. We found the Talisma GUI to be unglamorous but effective for navigating the large amount of information hosted in the application’s databases.

Talisma CRM modules support a wide range of features from creating a marketing campaign to automatically converting opportunities into orders. Throughout the process, including handling of customer accounts and managing interactions such as phone calls and e-mail, Talisma keeps an accurate tally of the costs and potential revenues associated with each step, automatically creating a profitability summary for each opportunity, account, and campaign.

Depending on the complexity of your business flows, adjusting Talisma to automatically acknowledge the cost of each customer interaction may require administrators to do some complicated setting; however, the end result is actually quite simple and transparent to the end-user.

We created a new account, using the Citrix ICA, to access the Talisma fat client via the Web. We added a contact for that account and built a sales opportunity for that customer that included items from the product database. To spice up our transactions, we mimicked a couple of phone and e-mail exchanges with the customer contact. Incidentally, a built-in spelling checker flagged typing errors in our e-mail messages.

Back on the opportunity main screen, Talisma had automatically calculated the cost of each interaction and the expected revenues for that deal. We found a similar summary on the account and marketing campaign pages.

This is very valuable information for sales and marketing managers who want to easily keep an eye on the progress of a marketing campaign, a customer, or a single deal. In addition, using Talisma Analytics (essentially, reporting on steroids), managers can monitor details such as sales and support performance by department, region, or single reps using a variety of queries.

To effectively support CRM activities for your company, Talisma has to be adjusted by administrators to the specific business flows, organization structure, and rules. This can be accomplished with the Business Administrator GUI, one of the browser-contained clients, which gives access to a variety of nontechnical settings, including defining users and teams and assigning roles to regulate access to the features of the suite.

A major feature of the Business Administrator is to define business rules to automate routine activities, such as changing the status of an opportunity or notifying the team of changes to the customers’ database. Those rules can be expressed in plain English, which makes the tool easy to use for nontechnical users. A typical use for rules is to define routing criteria for incoming messages to the appropriate team, or balancing the number of messages automatically dispatched to team members. Depending on the interactions channels used in your company, Talisma rules can promptly assign telephone calls, e-mail messages, or chat requests to the appropriate rep, helping ensure that your customer’s query will not go unnoticed.

Despite our reservations about the variety of client options, we liked our first experience with Talisma. A full-fledged, browser-based client would make the solutions easier to deploy and less confusing for nontechnical users. Nevertheless, the suite has the potential to respond to varying business requirements and offers powerful tools to simplify business activity and interactions with customers. If your customer service costs are reaching the roof, you may want to consider Talisma CRM Suite.