Talisma Announces Release of CIM 8.0

Talisma Corporation, a vendor of Customer Interaction Management (CIM) products, has announced the release of Talisma CIM 8.0, the latest version of their customer service, sales, and support suite.

Talisma CIM 8.0 includes "many updates," company officials promise, with the most significant, in the company's opinion, being the addition of "proactive capabilities in the two new CIM products Talisma Campaign and Talisma VoIP, and the existing Talisma Chat."

Talisma Campaign, a multi-channel management and tracking application, lets businesses provide a more personalized customer experience -- the product's Real-Time Offer Engine sends customers tailored offers, either directly online or via a customer service agent, that reflect their profile, historical data, and current activity on a Web site.

Businesses using Talisma Campaign should be able to cut down a bit on inbound e-mails and telephone calls by alerting customers of product updates, billing notifications, and profile updates.

With the addition of Talisma VoIP companies now have the ability to offer Web site visitors instant access to a live agent through Voice over Internet Protocol technology. By using voice communication, company officials maintain, businesses will be able to "expand their global reach, and customers will only have to click a button on the site to establish a voice connection with an agent directly through their computer."

In March Talisma announced that Talisma Chat and Talisma Email are the latest CIM products to be certified on salesforce.com’s AppExchange.

The AppExchange certification process includes application testing by salesforce.com, as well as the submission of endorsements from customers who have used the applications.

In the second half of 2006, Talisma and salesforce.com shared several joint new customers including Acclaim Games, Ad Astra, AVST (News - Alert), Geeks in a Flash!, JLG Industries, Maxwell Systems, Safari Books Online, and SelectTV.

Salesforce.com (News - Alert) customers have been using Talisma products via the AppExchange for about a year, according to Matt Holleran, vice president, AppExchange partners, salesforce.com.

Talisma’s CIM suite is designed to help salesforce Service & Support case management capabilities by providing agents with single-click access to the salesforce customer account and case information, automatically opening or retrieving cases, capturing disposition codes, and updating the customer record with relevant customer interactions.

In early March, Talisma announced that the CIM Forum, a non-profit business and technology consortium focused on improving online customer interactions which it sponsors along with IBM (News - Alert), has increased its member base to over 250 different organizations.

Additionally, the CIM Forum has released the "Best Practices in E-mail Management" report, the organization's second published report since its launch last July.

The CIM Forum was formed with founding members including Epson, IBM, Microsoft (News - Alert), Outsell, Pitney Bowes, and Sprint.  Among the new members are organizations such as Boeing Employees Credit Union, Mazda, Salesforce.com, and The University of Notre Dame.

"The CIM Forum offers a unique opportunity to engage in a dialogue among peers and experts regarding the importance of online customer service best practices," said Allen Bonde, Senior Vice President, Strategy and Marketing of eVergance, which helps to co-manage the Forum and its research.

The "Best Practices in E-mail Management" report addresses four major areas it sees as "crucial to providing an exceptional customer experience," to wit using Web forms and links, creating specialized teams, using prepared/auto responses and managing response times.

According to recent research cited by Talisma officials, of the 93 percent of sites offering e-mail as a customer support option, only 39 percent acknowledged the receipt of customers' messages with an automated e-mail response. It also found that 42 percent of sites resolved e-mail inquiries within 24 hours, but 41 percent of sites took three days or longer or were completely unresponsive.

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims' columnist page.

Voice over IP (VoIP)	X
A real-time communications system that converts voice into digital packets containing media and signaling data that travel over networks using Internet Protocol....more

Internet Protocol (IP)	X
IP stands for Internet Protocol, a data-networking protocol developed throughout the 1980s. It is the established standard protocol for transmitting and receiving data in packets over the Internet. I...more

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